Interviews
Johanna Nichols:
What were your expectations of this Summer School (and did it measure up to the expectations)?
I wasn’t sure what to expect. Other schools (spring, summer) that I have seen have involved fairly static lectures on current research topics. These were much more interactive, with more student participation, and I thought that was excellent.
What were your personal pros and contras for coming to our School?
I’ve been working with Russian linguists and with minority languages of Russia as well as on Russian for four decades, and I’m always glad for opportunities to travel to Russia and keep abreast firsthand of ongoing trends here. In addition, I want very much to see linguistics in HSE prosper and grow, and I’m always glad to take any opportunity to contribute to its programs.
Was there anything unexpected/surprising in the course of the School?
The other lectures were more interesting and more useful to me than expected. I didn’t expect to sit through all the lectures, but after the first ones I continued listening to them all because they were so interesting to me.
What were you guided by in choosing the specific topic for your lectures?
Typology has changed in recent years, taking on a more quantitative approach and requiring more teamwork and collaboration. I wanted to make this clear, yet show in my choice of topics that it is still essential to have linguists doing good linguistic analysis, informed by the peculiarities of the languages and areas of their expertise, contributing the substantive variables used in quantitative analysis. Unfortunately, too much work especially in historical comparison, is based on shoddy data or weak understanding of the linguistic groundwork.
What was the most interesting question you were asked at your lectures?
I don’t recall any specific one that was most interesting. Several student questions were interesting in the high level of sophistication they displayed. Several questions from my colleagues helped me focus my own research questions more sharply.
What was your impression of the audience? Does the audience in Moscow differ from the audience in your country? If yes, in what ways?
Very high level of preparation and sophistication among both students and professionals. Linguists here focus more on Eurasian languages; those in my country work more on American languages. Since there are so many structural differences between the languages, the kinds of questions I get differ.
How would you explain to a novice what linguistic typology is about?
Comparison. Its main goals are to find the most revealing and useful properties of language to use in tracing their history, relating language structure and history to human history, genetics, archaeology, geography, etc. In particular, we want to know why languages differ so much, what they have in common, why structural types and grammatical differences are distributed as they are.
In your opinion, what are the most promising trends in linguistic typology today?
Quantitative and computational work. It enables us to get firm answers to questions that were far too complex to be handled until recently. And it enables us to bring our findings together with those of other fields. But it has dangers: as some recent phylogenetic work has shown, it can be hasty or sloppy in its use of linguistic data, undermining the validity of its own results. So it’s very important that rigorous linguistic analysis and close knowledge of languages, their structures and histories, etc. play an important role in quantitative work.
Were there any critical discoveries that gave a new thrust to the development of linguistic typology?
Not so much single critical discoveries but the ongoing improvement of grammatical descriptions and the current emphasis on fieldwork, making available a much richer and more complete body of linguistic data than I would have thought possible 20 years ago.
Do you think linguistic typology receives a due attention in the linguistic community today?
I think it receives less attention than it deserves but much more than it did 10-20 years ago.
Hrach Martirosyan:
What were your expectations of this Summer School?
I expected to share with scholars my views on highlights of Indo-European heritage in Armenian, to meet a number of bright young researchers, as well as to learn something in linguistic typology, that is a field out of my own expertise. In the whole, everything went as I expected.
What were your personal pros and contras for coming to our School?
I did not hesitate to come here; I knew this is a decent scientific centre, and my aforementioned expectations made me accept the invitation with pleasure.
Was there anything unexpected/surprising in the course of the School?
I was nicely surprised by the high level of students. They speak English well, are very attentive at lectures, ask clever questions, do not talk to each other in the time of lectures, etc. It is comparable to what I see in the Netherlands, where I live currently.
Francisco Queixalos:
What were your expectations of this Summer School?
Meet Russian colleagues.
What was your impression of the audience?
Well prepared, easy contact, excellent English.
What were your expectations of this Summer School (and did it measure up to the expectations)?
I wasn’t sure what to expect. Other schools (spring, summer) that I have seen have involved fairly static lectures on current research topics. These were much more interactive, with more student participation, and I thought that was excellent.
What were your personal pros and contras for coming to our School?
I’ve been working with Russian linguists and with minority languages of Russia as well as on Russian for four decades, and I’m always glad for opportunities to travel to Russia and keep abreast firsthand of ongoing trends here. In addition, I want very much to see linguistics in HSE prosper and grow, and I’m always glad to take any opportunity to contribute to its programs.
Was there anything unexpected/surprising in the course of the School?
The other lectures were more interesting and more useful to me than expected. I didn’t expect to sit through all the lectures, but after the first ones I continued listening to them all because they were so interesting to me.
What were you guided by in choosing the specific topic for your lectures?
Typology has changed in recent years, taking on a more quantitative approach and requiring more teamwork and collaboration. I wanted to make this clear, yet show in my choice of topics that it is still essential to have linguists doing good linguistic analysis, informed by the peculiarities of the languages and areas of their expertise, contributing the substantive variables used in quantitative analysis. Unfortunately, too much work especially in historical comparison, is based on shoddy data or weak understanding of the linguistic groundwork.
What was the most interesting question you were asked at your lectures?
I don’t recall any specific one that was most interesting. Several student questions were interesting in the high level of sophistication they displayed. Several questions from my colleagues helped me focus my own research questions more sharply.
What was your impression of the audience? Does the audience in Moscow differ from the audience in your country? If yes, in what ways?
Very high level of preparation and sophistication among both students and professionals. Linguists here focus more on Eurasian languages; those in my country work more on American languages. Since there are so many structural differences between the languages, the kinds of questions I get differ.
How would you explain to a novice what linguistic typology is about?
Comparison. Its main goals are to find the most revealing and useful properties of language to use in tracing their history, relating language structure and history to human history, genetics, archaeology, geography, etc. In particular, we want to know why languages differ so much, what they have in common, why structural types and grammatical differences are distributed as they are.
In your opinion, what are the most promising trends in linguistic typology today?
Quantitative and computational work. It enables us to get firm answers to questions that were far too complex to be handled until recently. And it enables us to bring our findings together with those of other fields. But it has dangers: as some recent phylogenetic work has shown, it can be hasty or sloppy in its use of linguistic data, undermining the validity of its own results. So it’s very important that rigorous linguistic analysis and close knowledge of languages, their structures and histories, etc. play an important role in quantitative work.
Were there any critical discoveries that gave a new thrust to the development of linguistic typology?
Not so much single critical discoveries but the ongoing improvement of grammatical descriptions and the current emphasis on fieldwork, making available a much richer and more complete body of linguistic data than I would have thought possible 20 years ago.
Do you think linguistic typology receives a due attention in the linguistic community today?
I think it receives less attention than it deserves but much more than it did 10-20 years ago.
Hrach Martirosyan:
What were your expectations of this Summer School?
I expected to share with scholars my views on highlights of Indo-European heritage in Armenian, to meet a number of bright young researchers, as well as to learn something in linguistic typology, that is a field out of my own expertise. In the whole, everything went as I expected.
What were your personal pros and contras for coming to our School?
I did not hesitate to come here; I knew this is a decent scientific centre, and my aforementioned expectations made me accept the invitation with pleasure.
Was there anything unexpected/surprising in the course of the School?
I was nicely surprised by the high level of students. They speak English well, are very attentive at lectures, ask clever questions, do not talk to each other in the time of lectures, etc. It is comparable to what I see in the Netherlands, where I live currently.
Francisco Queixalos:
What were your expectations of this Summer School?
Meet Russian colleagues.
What was your impression of the audience?
Well prepared, easy contact, excellent English.