I have been doing fieldwork ever since my first year of undergraduate studies. I cannot imagine life without my travels to "the field". Fieldwork is exciting not only because you can get all the data your analysis requires, but also because of its social and cultural features. I enjoy working with people, and I especially enjoy the moments in which a consultant's appreciation for their language shines through. There are few things more romantic than walking through the fields to a small village, stepping into someone's place, and talking while drinking a cup of herbal tea. I also like living together with my colleagues; how fun it is to share food and linguistics with friends.

What follows is an account of my fieldwork history.

People say that your first fieldtrip is always the best. My experience proved the rule as I had a fantastic time. It was the culmination of MSO field project on the Moksha language. We lived in a ruined school in a small village, and the atmosphere was sublime! There were so many experienced linguists, each of them always available to assist us students in discussing our questionnaires and analyzing our collected data. I learned not to forget collecting negative data. I learned to analyze data and make predictions. In fact, during these two weeks I learned more than I learned during the first year at the university. While on this fieldtrip, I submitted my first abstract. After this trip I had my first poster and my first talk. I had my first proceedings publication. This trip made a linguist of me.

My task was to understand semantics of different possessive constructions. It seems that I misunderstood the task, and I started digging into syntax instead... Three years later, I ended up writing the chapter about noun phrase structure for our Moksha grammar book.

Having gained some experience exploring the possessive constructions of Moksha, I went to Northern Siberia to study the possessive constructions of the local dialect of Komi. Komi is also a Finno-Ugric language, and so I had a much easier time studying it than I did with Moksha. I found some non-standard properties of possessive constructions and wrote an article (which is still in press...). Nenets genitive is realized phonetically as a glottal stop. However, it is pronounced not in all contexts, therefore as a young and unexperienced undergraduate student, instead of possessive constructions, I decided to study verbs of "falling" in Nenets.

After my experiences studying Moksha and Komi, I started to consider myself an experienced fieldworker. After my third year of undergraduate studies, we started two field projects on Hill Mari. There were two groups, which worked in two different villages. I could not choose only one, and so I was allowed to join both of them. Consequently, I had the opportunity to work with two lightly different dialects of Hill Mari. My dream is to write a paper on the differences I found, which were only possible to find after working on the language for an extended period of time. At first glance, the dialects looked the same.

Now, I am finishing my chapters for a Hill Mari grammar which is prepared as a result of one of these field projects. My own chapter is on Noun Phrase structure. I have also co-authored chapters on differential object marking, constructions with sentential arguments, comparison of noun phrase and postpositional phrase structure and a small sketch about questions.

At some point, in need of a break from my syntactic studies, I collected a lot of spoken data using The Questionnaire for Information Structure (QUIS). I have not finished analyzing the data yet, but this is a great source for studying information structure and prosody. The data is from both villages, so I will be able to capture the subtle differences between the two dialects.

I learned to speak Hungarian in college. Consequently, when the Lingvodoc project needed a person to go to Hungary and collect some dialectal data, I said that I would be happy to. This is how I started working for the Institute of Linguistics RAS. Hungarian dialects vary in their amount of short vowels, and I had to record long lists of words from several speakers in four dialectal zones. I had 10 days. I was travelling alone. We had no contacts there, and I had to find the consultants on the spot and work very operatively. I woke up very early and went to the most remote villages. There I went to the village's church, as well as some retirement communities. I needed to quickly ascertain whether the speaker had non-standard pronunciation. I realized very quickly that the most non-standard speakers did not speak any language other than Hungarian. So, my two years of Hungarian in college were my only hope...

It was a great experience that I will never forget. As a result, I helped to create four small electronic vocabularies for Hungarian, transcribing and annotating the collected data.

As a child I already dreamed to go to Latin America and see how indigenous people live. I did not know anything about linguistics, but I was feeling that I wanted to deal with their languages... Finally, thanks to Guatemala Field Station, my dream came true, and I had an oportunity to go to Guatemala and study Kaqchikel.

Now, I am working on Kaqchikel oral corpus, as well as on Kaqchikel nominal morphosyntax. In contrast to verbal morphosyntax and Agent Focus, nominal morphosyntax was not in the scope of linguists' interests. Nevertheless, it is very interesting (it's more tricky than you might expect), and I have already held a couple of talks about possessive constructions and plural marking in Kaqchikel. I have even have published an article about the latter.