Paper on Balkan verbal complex published

Andrea Sims and Brian Joseph’s paper ‘Morphology versus syntax in the Balkan verbal complex‘ has just been published in the volume Balkan syntax and (universal) principles of grammar, edited by Iliana Krapova and Brian Joseph.

Paper Abstract: Various Balkan languages have a string of material called here the “verbal complex”, in which a verb occurs with various markers for tense, modality, negation, and argument structure. We examine here this verbal complex with regard to its status as a syntactic element or a morphological element. First, we carefully outline the theoretical basis for determining the status of a given entity and we then argue that the verbal complexes display different degrees of morphologization in the different languages. Albanian and Greek show the highest degree of morphologization of the verbal complex, with Macedonian close to them in this regard. Bulgarian shows a lesser degree of morphologization than Macedonian, making for an interesting split within East South Slavic, and Serbian shows an even lesser degree. We argue further that certain aspects of the verbal complex, especially in the languages with the greatest morphologization, represent contact-related convergence, and draw from this a general claim about the role of surface structure in language contact.

Slavic morphology: New approaches to classic problems

Andrea has published an article in the Journal of Slavic Linguistics (volume 25, issue 2). This issue, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the journal, includes state of the field articles for different subfields of linguistics. Check out Andrea’s contribution to the anniversary issue: Slavic morphology: New approaches to classic problems, illustrated with Russian.

Abstract: This state-of-the-field article traces some recent trajectories of morphological theory, illustrated via four classic problems of Slavic morphology: vowel-zero alternation, stem consonant mutations, paradigmatic gaps, and animacy-determined accusative syncretism. Using Russian as the primary illustrating data, one theme that emerges is that theories that leverage the distributional properties of the lexicon have made progress against previously intractable aspects of these phenomena, including idiosyncratic lexical distributions, unexpected (non)productivity, and distributions shared by distinct exponents. In turn, the analyses raise new questions.

Welcome, Michelle!

Welcome to Michelle McKenzie!

Michelle is an undergraduate (majoring in Linguistics and Russian) who has begun working with Andrea to investigate the semantic properties of Russian and English derived words. In an earlier paper (“Lexical processing and affix ordering”, 2015), Andrea and Jeff Parker show based on corpus data that Russian derivational morphology has distributional properties that are indicative of high rates of decomposition during morphological processing — more so than for similar English derived words. Michelle plans to test predictions that these distributional facts make about the semantic transparency of derived words in each language. Are words with similar frequency profiles more semantically compositional in Russian than in English?

Watch this space for updates as the work progresses…

Katja Kibler presents at Midwest Slavic

Congratulations to M.A. student Katja Kibler on presenting her ongoing research at the 2017 Midwest Slavic Conference (April 7-9 at Ohio State). In her presentation, “Lexical Borrowings from Chinese into Russian among Russians Living in China”, Katja explored how the patterns of borrowing and non-borrowing can be explained using a community of practice analysis.

She continues to work on her data (with 100+ hours of audio still to go through) and is looking forward to completing her M.A. paper on this topic by the end of the year!

Andrea u Beogradu

In April, Andrea Sims had the chance to visit the Laboratorija za Eksperimentalnu Psihologiju (Laboratory for Experimental Psychology) at the Univerzitet u Beogradu, in Belgrade, Serbia.

As part of her work there, she piloted an experiment that explores the role of syncretism (inflectional homophony) in resolving syntactic case conflicts in Serbian morphosyntax. This project is a collaboration with Matt Goldrick (Northwestern University). She also gave a research talk, conducted other research, met local psycholinguists and learned about work happening in the lab. And worked on her spoken Serbian, of course.

Despite unseasonably cold weather, it was a great visit to the city. It wasn’t Andrea’s first trip to Belgrade, but it was the first time she was able to explore the city in detail — everything from Davis Cup tennis (Serbia beat Spain!) to the Nikola Tesla museum to walking on Ada Ciganlija and exploring Belgrade’s growing Neo-Balkan food scene.

A big thanks to everyone in the lab, and especially Prof. Aleksandar Kostić, for being such generous hosts. Hvala Vam puno!

Grad student symposium

On February 18, 2017 the Slavic Linguistics Forum and the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures (DSEELC) held the first annual DSEELC Linguistics Symposium. The theme of this year’s symposium was “Language Away from the Homeland.”

With Prof. Renee Perelmutter (University of Kansas) giving the keynote speech on “Multiglossia and Globalization in the Online Discourse of Russian-speaking Israelis”, eight student presenters coming from all over the country, and participation from several departments at OSU, the event was a great success.

The event was organized by DSEELC graduate students Katja Kibler, Katya Rouzina and Hope Wilson. Congratulations on the successful conference!

OSU at the Slavic Linguistics Society meeting

sls2016_osupeopleOhio State was well represented at the most recent Slavic Linguistics Society meeting, held in September at the University of Toronto.

Faculty member Andrea Sims gave a plenary talk titled “Inflectional systems and the dynamic organization of the lexicon”. Several of our awesome current and former students also got in on the action, presenting their research. Shown at left (from left to right): Jeff Parker (Ph.D. 2016, now at Brigham Young University), Kate White (Ph.D. 2015, now at Rice University), Katya Rouzina (Ph.D. in progress), Andrea Sims, and Rob Reynolds (M.A. 2011, now at University of Tromsø). Not shown: Bojan Belić (Ph.D. 2005, now at University of Washington).

It was a great showing for the Slavic linguistics program! And a fun reunion. (But maybe not the best choice to have our picture taken in front of the projection screen…:)

Check out the slides from Andrea’s talk on her academia.edu page.

Jeff Parker earns Ph.D.

Jeff Parker dissertation defense

Jeff Parker (in the tie) with part of his dissertation committee: Brian Joseph, Andrea Sims, and Greg Stump

On May 26, Jeff Parker successfully defended his dissertation, Inflectional complexity and cognitive processing: An experimental and corpus-based investigation of Russian nouns. The dissertation committee consisted of OSU faculty members Andrea Sims (Chair), Brian Joseph, and Mark Pitt, and University of Kentucky faculty member Greg Stump.

Congratulations, Dr. Parker!

Jeff will be officially hooded in August 2016 and will start a faculty position at Brigham Young University in the fall. We wish him good luck and success in all of his future endeavors!

Read the abstract of Jeff’s dissertation

Graph of the Day

Russian nominal inflectional structureCheck out this awesome visualization of the inflection class structure of Russian nouns. Pretty (and informative!) graphs make us happy…

The nodes are Russian nominal inflection classes — 87 in total, representing a fairly fine-grained description of inflectional information. The size of the nodes reflects the log type frequency of each class, i.e., how many words it contains. Classes that share at least half of their inflectional exponents are connected by an edge, with a darker line for more overlap.

The graph was produced in R using the igraph package, one of Andrea’s new favorite tools.

Russian is one of nine languages that Andrea Sims and Jeff Parker are investigating for an ongoing project on the implicative structure of inflectional systems (paper in progress).

Sociolinguistic space in Ukraine

Ukraine_heatmap_1The ongoing political and military conflict in Eastern Ukraine is the backdrop for research by Ph.D. candidate and sociolinguist Yuliia Aloshycheva. Ukraine has a symbolic East-West divide that plays out not only in political terms, but also in linguistic ones – Russian is symbolically assigned to the ‘East’ and Ukrainian to the ‘West’ (or to the nation as a whole). However, beyond broad stereotypes, there is little understanding of the internal dynamics of the language-place relationship. How do Ukrainian citizens ‘imagine’ the country and its languages?

In her dissertation, Yuliia is developing an emic understanding of place in Ukraine and how sociopolitically charged language varieties are connected to people’s conceptualization of place. She is looking at how people’s self-orientation (for instance, toward the nation as a whole vs. towards their immediate locale) influences how place, language and social characteristics get linked together at this sociopolitically important moment. Do Eastern and Western Ukrainians have the same understanding of the sociolinguistic space of Ukraine? Is the way that people link place, language and social characteristics different than before the current conflict?

Yuliia Aloshycheva

Yuliia Aloshycheva

Part of Yuliia’s data comes from Skype interviews, the goals of which were to elicit participants’ explicit intuitions about how language ‘works’ in Ukraine, their attitudes towards language varieties, and how they orient themselves to sociolinguistic positions. The interviews were conducted with participants from three geographically distinct regions of Ukraine in October-November 2015. Yuliia reflects on her experience of conducting the interviews:

“Having dealt with human subjects only indirectly, through online questionnaires, the idea of conducting 45 one-on-one interviews seemed terrifying at first. What if no one signs up? Should I be paying my participants more/less? How do I make them talk? The list of questions just kept growing bigger and bigger. My task as an interviewer seemed to be further complicated by the uneasy sociopolitical situation in the east of Ukraine: How do I go about asking sensitive questions? How do I reconcile the multitude of identities that I am ‘made of’ and which identity do I put forward in order to build rapport with the participants?

Even though looking back now, I understand that many of my fears were ungrounded, I would like to share a few things that I learned in the course of interviews. One is being attentive to your interviewee, showing genuine interest in their personality, in what they say. Being a discoverer, a learner, rather than a teacher, an authority, is key. Another important thing is flexibilitymoloko. I remember one moment I could be perceived as an empathetic ‘I’m-just-like-you’ co-Ukrainian and in the next moment I was an estranged scholar from an overseas university.

All in all, I think it was a fantastic experience that helped me grow a lot as a sociolinguist but also as an interlocutor.”

Yuliia is currently analyzing the interview data, looking at perception of linguistic variables like akan’e (vowel reduction in unstressed syllables) vs. okan’e (non-reduction) and pronunciation of ‘what’ as [ʃt͡ʃo] vs. [ʃo]. The interviews produced rich, multifaceted data, so we can’t wait to see the results! (Coming soon!) The dissertation work is being co-supervised by Andrea Sims (Slavic) and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler (Linguistics).