Projects
I contributed to a number of research projects. Below I provide information on these projects.
"The Ukrainian Constructicon"
2023-2024
The project builds a digital searchable database of prominent Ukrainian patterns of phrase and sentence structures, i.e. grammatical constructions. The resource is available at https://constructicon.github.io/ukrainian/
"Construxercise! Hands-on learning of Russian Constructions"
2022
My participation: Principal Investigator (PI)
"The Russian Constructicon"
2018-2022
https://constructicon.github.io/russian/
My participation: de facto lead
"Constructional Landscape of Russian Syntax (CLARUS): Modeling native speakers' knowledge for second language learners"
2018 - 2022
My participation: postdoctoral research fellow
The CLARUS project focuses on the syntactic level of Russian grammar and takes a constructionist usage-based approach to syntax (Croft 2001; Goldberg 2006; Fillmore et al. 1988).
The main objective is to build and calibrate the Russian Constructicon, an open-access electronic resource that offers a searchable database of Russian constructions accompanied with thorough descriptions of their properties (available at https://constructicon.github.io/russian/).
More specifically, the CLARUS project will regularize the existing version of the Russian Constructicon and supply it with additional empirical linguistic material. In particular, the project will carry out corpus data analyses in order to identify missing constructions and describe the semantic and syntactic constraints on their open slots. The CLARUS project will also harmonize the classification system employed in the Russian Constructicon.
"Varangian Rus’ Digital Environment: electronic dictionary resource, text comments, interactive exercises"
2015 - 2017
My participation: translation of historical and dialectological commentaries of the Old Russian texts (from Russian to English and from English to Russian)
The objective of this project is to provide an electronic dictionary resource for Old Russian texts supplemented with commentary on diachronic and dialectal properties of words (preliminary version available at https://russisk.uit.no/source/24).
“Neat Theories, Messy Realities: How to apply absolute definitions to gradient phenomena”
2011 - 2014
My participation: PhD candidate (see my PhD dissertation here)
This project undertakes a thorough examination of one of the most fundamental concepts of linguistics, namely allomorphy, examining in detail a range of case studies that fit and deviate from the traditional definition to varying degrees. We propose new standards for applying linguistic definitions, and also yield more precise descriptions of languages that can be implemented in language teaching.
My contribution to this project was writing a doctoral dissertation entitled "Non-Standard Allomorphy in Russian Prefixes: Corpus, Experimental, and Statistical Exploration" (2014).
Funding: The project is supported by a grant from the Norwegian Research Council.
“Time is Space: Unconscious Models and Conscious Acts”
Jan 2011 - Jan 2012
My participation: research group member
The project investigates the TIME IS SPACE metaphor on the basis of well-documented data from Slavic languages including temporal adverbials and the grammatical categories of tense and aspect.
The group leaders of the project are professors Tore Nesset and Laura A. Janda. This project was supported by a grant from the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo.
“Exploring Emptiness: Russian derivational morphology in cognitive linguistics”
2009 - 2010
https://uit.no/forskning/forskningsgrupper/sub?p_document_id=344365&sub_id=344367
My participation: research assistant
Can a linguistic form be void of meaning? What impact does this question have on the relationship between form and meaning in language?
Prefixes: There are nineteen prefixes traditionally assumed to be semantically “empty” in Russian. These nineteen prefixes are combined with nearly two thousand verbs. According to the traditional model, a learner of Russian must memorize which prefix to use with which verb, since there is no way to make sense of the relationship between verbs and prefixes. By analyzing large databases of Russian, we have discovered a well-behaved system of meanings that improves both our linguistic understanding of Russian and our capacity to teach the language. We have created an interactive database of verbs and prefixes in Russian.
Suffixes: As the result of an ongoing language change, several dozen verbs in Russian can be conjugated according to two different suffix patterns. For example, ‘I wave’ can be conjugated as either mašu (according to the -a suffix pattern) or maxaju (according to the -aj suffix pattern). These suffixes are assumed to be empty, but careful analysis of language data reveals meaningful patterns. Our studies yield better linguistic description that can also benefit language teaching.
The project resulted in an open access database of Russian aspectual pairs and a co-authored monograph accompanied with various supplementary materials made available on-line.
Funding: The Exploring Emptiness project is sponsored by grants from the Norwegian Research Council and Sparebankens Gavefond.