The article is dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the outstanding Russian linguist, professor of Saratov State University Olga B. Sirotinina (born in 1923). The article presents and analyzes a number of scientific ideas of the scholar: the necessity to work out new approaches to syntactic units; the interaction of primary (factual) and secondary (organizational) levels of communication; attention of the author to the addressee as a leading principle of linguistic ecology; semantic diffusion as a dynamic process in the Russian discourse.