Publications

The Russian language, despite being one of the most studied in the world, until recently has been little explored quantitatively. After a burst of research activity in the years 1960-1980, quantitative studies of Russian vanished. They are now reappearing in an entirely different context. Today we have large and deeply annotated corpora available for extended quantitative research, such as the Russian National Corpus, ruWac, RuTenTen, to name just a few (websites for these and other resources will be found in a special section in the References). The present volume is intended to fill the lacuna between the available data and the methods that can be applied to studying them.

Our goal is to present current trends in researching Russian quantitative linguistics, to evaluate the research methods vis-à-vis Russian data, and to show both the advantages and the disadvantages of the methods. We especially encouraged our authors to focus on evaluating statistical methods and new models of analysis. New findings concern applicability, evaluation, and the challenges that arise from using quantitative approaches to Russian data. The goal of this volume is therefore twofold: a) to address the topic of quantitative analysis of the Russian language, and b) to present an evaluation of methods applied to Russian data.

This paper discuss the issues of polysynthesis focusing on West Circassian (Adyghe), a Northwest Caucasian language.

Standard Modern Russian has phonological contrast between palatal- ized and velarized consonants. One of the most prominent changes attributed recently to this part of its phonetic system is the dramatic aƵrication of pala- talized dental stops which are now pronounced in most phonetic contexts as aƵricates [tsj], [dzj]. The paper proposes the hypothesis that a fast spread of palatalized dental stops’ aƵrication in Standard Modern Russian is triggered by the need to more eƵectively distinguish palatalized plosives in situations that do not provide the primary acoustic cue (formant transition of adjacent vowel) for their diƵerentiation to the listener. Palatalized dental plosives still should be treated phonologically as stops since in the context of homorganic nasal or stop they are not aƵricated (and often unreleased), while the fricative part of dental aƵricates in the same position still preserved in pronunciation of all the subjects studied.

This paper surveys relative clause constructions in West Circassian (Adyghe) and Kabardian.

Aims and hypothesis:

The aim of this article is to introduce a case of syntactic borrowing. I test the hypothesis that the uses of volitional forms (optative, imperative, hortative and jussive) in complement clauses of the verbs of wish and in purpose clauses in East Caucasian languages evolve under the influence of Azerbaijanian.

Design/methodology/approach and data and analysis:

The data of 13 languages are considered in the paper. To prove that shared features are contact-induced, two control languages are included in the sample. Archi belongs to the same genetic group as the languages that use volitionals in subordinate clauses, but is exposed to Azerbaijanian to a lesser extent. Axaxdərə Akhvakh belongs to another group, but has strong contacts with Azerbaijanian due to recent migration.

Findings/conclusions:

A survey shows that volitionals are used in subordinate clauses most extensively in those languages whose speakers exhibit a high level of bilingualism in Azerbaijanian, and where the contact has been longer. I assume that there is a hierarchy of borrowability of subordinate constructions involving volitionals.

Originality:

Although the influence of Turkic languages on the languages of the Caucasus in the domain of syntax has been previously discussed, the usage of volitionals in subordinate clauses has not.

Significance/implications:

It is acknowledged that social factors play an important role in shaping the linguistic consequences of contact. However, evidence of the correspondence between social factors and structural outcomes of language contact is still very scarce. The relevance of two social factors is shown in this paper: the ratio of bilingual speakers and the duration of contact.

Limitations:

I advance the hypothesis that connects the borrowability of particular constructions to their typological frequency, but the typology of subordinate uses of volitionals is not well enough investigated to make final conclusions.

 

This paper presents the results of our experiments on building a general coreference resolution system for Russian. The main aim of those experiments was to set a baseline for this task for Russian using the standard set of features developed and tested for coreference resolution systems created for other languages. We propose several baseline systems, both rule-based and ML-based. We show that adding some semantic information is crucial for the task and even the small amount of data can improve the overall result. We show that different types of semantic resources affect the performance differently and sometimes more does not imply better.

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In this article, I will present data collected during the fieldwork in Khodz (Koshekhablsky District, Republic of Adygea, Russia). The participants (nine native speakers of Kuban dialect of Kabardian) were asked to solve several speech production tasks:

tell a story based on the picture to other participant read a prosaic text read a verse Articulation rate was calculated as the number of syllables per second. Several measurements were made: average articulation rate of the different speakers during all tasks and average speech rate depending on the utterance length. Spontaneous material considered, the average rate equaled 4.33 syllables per second with 95% confident interval equaled ±0.18 and standard deviation equaled 1.19. In (Fonagy, Magdics 1960, Stepanova 2011) it is reported a strong negative correlation between speech rate and the utterance length. Our data provide a small correlation (0.1252841 ± 0.07679026) between speech rate and the utterance length. All audio data were annotated using ELAN (v. 4.9.4); measurements were made using Praat (v. 5.3.16); all statistical inferences and visualization were made in R (v. 3.3.2).

The paper discusses valency-changing operations in West Circassian (Adyghe), a polysynthetic language of the North Caucasus. West Circassian is a strongly valency-increasing language, which has many means that add arguments to the subcategorization frame of a predicate. Despite this, the language also seems to have several valency-changing operations which could be regarded as either eliminating some of the arguments or deriving intransitive verbs from transitive verbs. Yet, on a closer inspection such operations turn out not to be necessarily valency-reducing and/or transitivity-changing. The West Circassian data show that valency changing should not be tied with changing transitivity, as is sometimes proposed in the linguistic literature.

This paper presents a project aiming to create a complete digital edition of Leo Tolstoy’s works with rich structural, semantic, and metadata markup. The project is twofold: its first stage was a massive crowdsourcing effort to digitize Tolstoy’s 90-volume comprehensive print edition. That effort, known as ‘All of Tolstoy in One Click’, received considerable media attention (Bury 2013, McGrane 2013) and attracted more than three thousand volunteers from all over the world. Now that the first goal of ‘primary’ digitization had been achieved, an obvious next step was to provide the digitized texts with TEIconformant markup. This work is in progress at the moment. In the paper we describe both stages of the project (the completed and the ongoing) with a special focus on their social and educational impact. 

In this paper we apply network analysis to the study of literature. At the first stage of our investigation we automatically extract networks (graphs) of characters for each part of Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and peace using two different techniques for network creation. Then we evaluate these two techniques against a set of manually created gold standard networks. Finally, we use the method that demonstrated better performance in our evaluation to test a literary hypothesis about Tolstoy’s novel. The hypotheses we intended to prove was that the parts of the novel describing war (i.e. those where the battlefield or military units are the primary settings), have statistically lower density of interaction between characters, resulting in lower network density, higher network diameters and lesser average node degrees. By showing this correlation we mean to demonstrate the applicability of network analysis to computational research of fictional narrative (e.g. detection of tension changes in the plot).

The paper gives a detailed description of seven spatial nominal cases in the Beserman dialect of Udmurt, which do not exist in the literary language, namely, six personal local cases and the recessive. These cases are not fully grammaticalized and exhibit some properties rather more characteristic of relational nouns, which is their grammaticalization source. Moreover, we show that the approximative also shares some of these properties. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that the aforementioned units have enough case-like properties to be treated as (undergrammaticalized) cases. The study is based on our own field data collected in Udmurtia in 2010-2016.

The Differential grammatical marking is a widely discussed topic in linguistic typology. Following works of Comrie [Comrie, 1981], Silverstein [Silverstein, 1976], Aissen [Aissen, 2003] and others there is a general assumption that the differential encoding can be accounting for by the markedness principles and that it is affected by pragmatic/discourse scales reflecting the degree of a NP/DP’s “salience”. In present work, the phenomenon of differential encoding is viewed in terms of a paradigm choice. The main question is what pragmatic factors trigger differentiation vs. assimilation of paradigms. There is a typological evidence for the following tendency: the high position of an argument on the referential scale leads to the differentiation of intransitive vs. transitive verbs encoding, while the focus position of an argument leads to the assimilation of paradigms. The Moksha (Mordvin, Finno-Ugric) data can serve as an additional evidence for such approach. There are two conjugation types for verbs in Moksha. One is for intransitive verbs and the other is for transitive verbs. However, the choice of paradigm for transitive verbs depends on certain pragmatic conditions. The referential scale in general goes in hand with the information status scale. We can reformulate the tendency as follows: topicality affects the differentiation of paradigms (a separate encoding for a transitive verb in contrast to an intransitive one is chosen) while focus position of an NP/DP often leads to paradigm assimilation (the transitive verbs are marked with the same set of affixes as intransitive ones). Thus, the main claim of present work is that the paradigm choice can be a device for information status encoding.  

This paper is about verbs of animal sounds and their metaphorical uses with reference to human beings, artifacts, and nature in two closely related languages, Komi-Zyrian and Komi-Permyak. Much attention is paid to the comparison of the cognates. The study shows that even in closely related languages metaphors display essential distinctions, and extralinguistic factors explain only part of these distinctions. For this reason, the examination of genetically related languages is an interesting domain of lexical typology.

The paper concerns verbs of animal sounds in Finnish as well as their metaphorical uses with reference to human beings, artifacts, and nature. The paper attempts to define the main sources of metaphors for spontaneous bodily reactions, feelings and physiological perceptions, approving and disapproving reactions, inarticulate speech, and various characteristics of a voice such as timbre and loudness. The basic regularities determining the formation of metaphors related to artifacts are also described.

In the ongoing corpus project we annotate Russian constructions that have a metaphoric potential. Indirect linguistic metaphors are defined according to a customized version of the metaphor identification procedure MIPVU as the contrast between the basic and the contextual meaning of the lemmas participating in a construction. Direct Metaphors are defined as linguistic metaphors whose contextual meaning has two referents simultaneously, or, in terms of conceptual metaphor, there is a cross-domain mapping. Personification is a subtype of Indirect Metaphor where slots that require only animate participants are filled with non-animate arguments. The annotation of metaphor-related constructions is added as a new layer to SynTagRus, the Russian syntactical dependencies treebank. The paper focuses on the procedure of metaphor identification and the types of linguistic metaphors annotated.

In this paper we present a comparison of three morphological taggers for Russian with regard to the quality of morphological disambiguation performed by these taggers. We test the quality of the analysis in three different ways: lemmatization, POS-tagging and assigning full morphological tags. We analyze the mistakes made by the taggers, outline their strengths and weaknesses, and present a possible way to improve the quality of morphological analysis for Russian.

The paper presents the results of using some computer tools and applications for the purposes of the automated and semi-automated syntactical, lexica, and error analysis of student essays in a learner corpus. The texts in the corpus were written in English by Russian learners of English. The experiment in the research consisted in comparing the parameters of different types and at different levels in the essays graded by professional examiners as the best and those graded the lowest in the pool of about 2000 essays. At the first stage in the experiment the authors applied a syntactical tool for parsing the sentences, then analyzed the results of lexical observations in those texts, and finally collected the statistics related to the errors pointed out in manual expert annotation. The parameters that had very different values for the “good” and for the “bad” essays are regarded by the authors as worthy parts of the feedback a student has to get for the text uploaded into the learner corpus.

The paper presents a description and an analysis of the nominal complex, a peculiar construction which includes a noun and its modifiers, in West Circassian, a polysynthetic language of the Northwest Caucasian family. The nominal complex shows properties of a single word and tends to follow the template proposed for the word in West Circassian. However, its parts may themselves have a complex structure based on a similar template. This is argued to result from a principle that requires these subparts to be interpreted without appealing to a broader morphological context. In addition, the nominal complex may contain complex syntactic constituents as its proper parts. It is shown that the nominal complex in West Circassian is currently undergoing demorphologization and syntacticization.