Russian

Morphological Systems Group organizes AIMM5

 

Screenshot of AIMM5 GatherTown spaceScreenshot of AIMM5 poster session in GatherTown

We got to welcome more than 160 morphologists from around the world to OSU (virtually) for the 5th American International Morphology Meeting (AIMM5) last weekend. It was four busy but exciting days of stimulating talks and interesting discussion. (Check out this picture of one of the poster sessions that took place in Gather.Town!) We hope that everyone enjoyed the conference. We certainly did!

It was also an opportunity to show off some of the morphological research happening here at OSU. The program included five presentations from our group:

  • Martha Booker Johnson and Andrea D. Sims, “Using word vectors to investigate semantic transparency cross-linguistically”
  • Kyle Maycock and Andrea D. Sims, “Albanian second-position clitics as edge inflection: Evidence from cumulative exponence in the noun phrase”
  • Connor Rouillier, “The effect of event structure on subject-verb agreement in Najdi Arabic”
  • Noah Diewald, “Wao Terero lexical suffixes: Realization at the lexical semantic-discourse interface”
  • Micha Elsner and Andrea D. Sims, “Analogical modeling of morphology for L1 effects in language contact”

There were also presentations from OSU “friends of the morphology lab” Brian Joseph, Shuan Karim, and John Grinstead (with colleagues).

We look forward to AIMM6, to be held at the University of California, San Diego in 2023!

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…

Texas Linguistics Society

In September, Andrea Sims gave a keynote talk, “Morphological connectivity in the mental lexicon,” at the 17th Texas Linguistics Society meeting, in Austin, TX.

Check out the slides of the talk: sims-TLS2017-slides.

Thanks to all of the organizers for the invitation and a great conference!

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!

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).

International Quantitative Morphology Meeting

Jeff in Kalemegdan Park, Belgrade

Jeff in Kalemegdan Park, Belgrade

Jeff Parker and Andrea Sims just returned from Belgrade, Serbia, where they presented a paper at the First International Quantitative Morphology Meeting. The trip had a rough start, including a 26-hour travel delay that involved each being stranded in a different airport. Nonetheless, they made it to Belgrade in time to see some interesting talks, and got to show off some pretty cool graphs about the implicative structure of Russian and Greek nouns.

Slides from the talk: On the interaction of implicative structure and type frequency in inflectional systems (PDF)

Lauren Ressue earns Ph.D.

Andrea Sims and Lauren Ressue

Andrea Sims and Lauren Ressue

The Slavic Linguistics Lab has produced its first Ph.D.! Lauren Ressue  defended her dissertation, Reciprocity in Russian: an investigation of the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic interfaces in April. Andrea Sims (Slavic) and Judith Tonhauser (Linguistics) co-chaired the dissertation committee. Lauren was officially hooded at Ohio State’s spring graduation ceremony.

Abstract of Lauren’s dissertation

Congratulations, Dr. Ressue!