The article aims at the explanation of some distributional peculiarities of two high unrounded vowels [i] and [È] in Russian. More generally, it looks at some phonotactic constraints of Russian vowels which are directly related to a broader topic of palatalization and vowel reduction in this language. Although the discussion in this paper concerns only a tiny section of Russian phonology, which is the distribution of high unrounded vowels, it is necessary to introduce several facts from Russian phonology, such as palatalization, velarization, stress and vowel reduction. They, at first sight, may look pretty much irrelevant to the main topic of the paper but, as it will become evident, are closely related and actually indispensable to the understanding of vowel distribution including the two high unrounded vowels in Russian.

This paper has two main purposes: 1) to present a possible semantic account of phraseological meaning from a cognitive perspective and 2) to show the presence, the extent and the content of mental images and concepts in Spanish and Polish somatic phraseology.

I briefly define the notion of concept, its relationship with linguistic form and the mental image. After narrowing the notion of phraseologial unit, the main part of this paper focuses on an application of the notions of mental image and concept to selected somatic idioms. The phraseological units contain the somatic word boca ‘mouth’ as part of them and are presented by meaning correspondence in the Polish language. In the final section I point out to a possible difference with respect to the structure of meaning which could have natural and cultural implications.

This paper discusses the defi nitions of the glottal stop encountered in the literature. The term glottal stop appears in many works in the field of linguistics (or, more precisely, phonetics and phonology), phoniatrics, voice emission and speech therapy. However, this term may be understood in various ways. Generally speaking, in speech therapy, a glottal stop is defined, for example, as: 1. a form of phonation; 2. a type of pseudo articulation. In phonetics the term is referred to as: 1. a form of voicing initiation; 2. a type of articulation; 3. both the type of articulation and the type of phonation. In the light of the definitions quoted in this work, the answer to the question posed in the title of this paper is neither simple nor clear

This paper is a presentation of a success story of building a premier, non-university research organization dedicated to basic research and to supporting and developing early career researchers. This story comes back to establishing of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, predecessor of the Max Planck Society. Both those organizations were based upon so-called principle of Adolph von Harnack, the first president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. It consists in creating the research institutes around the leading – on a world scale – researchers, providing them the best possible working conditions and giving them freedom to build their research teams. This paper shows the way how the entire Max Planck Society is set up, what is its impartial position on a map of world leading research institutions and what are the reasons of the success of this organization. An outcome of research led in the Max Planck Institutes is shortly given.