Publications

In this paper, we address the issue of reliability of quantitative data on multilingualism of the past obtained as recall data. More specifically, we investigate whether the interviewees’ assessments of the language repertoires of their late relatives (indirect data) provide results that are quantitatively similar to those obtained from the people of the same age range themselves (direct data). The empirical data we use come from an ongoing field study of traditional multilingualism in Daghestan (Russia). We trained machine learning models to see whether they can detect differences in indirect and direct data. We conclude that our indirect quantitative data on L2 other than Russian are essentially similar to direct, while there may be a small but systematic underestimation when reporting other’s knowledge of Russian.

In this paper, I consider double causatives in Mehweb, a one village language spoken in Daghestan, Russia, and belonging to the Dargwa branch of East Caucasian. The capability of stacking two causative suffixes seems to be lexically restricted, and mapping onto verbal meanings that are typically P-labile in the languages of the family. Interestingly, the verbs allowing double causatives are not morphosyntactically labile in Mehweb, which is generally poor in labile verbs as compared to sister languages. I conclude that the ability to form double causatives is not a consequence of the morphosyntactic property of being labile; rather, both morphosyntactic properties follow from the same component of the lexical semantics of these verbs and ultimately from the properties of the situational concepts they convey. As a tentative functional explanation I suggest that the relevant property is the weakened status of the agentive participant.

Unlike stroke, neurosurgical removal of left-hemisphere gliomas acts upon a reorganized language network and involves brain areas rarely damaged by stroke. We addressed whether this causes the profiles of neurosurgeryand stroke-induced language impairments to be distinct. K-means clustering of language assessment data (neurosurgery cohort: N = 88, stroke cohort: N = 95) identified similar profiles in both cohorts. But critically, a cluster of individuals with specific phonological deficits was only evident in the stroke but not in the neurosurgery cohort. Thus, phonological deficits are less clearly distinguished from other language deficits after glioma surgery compared to stroke. Furthermore, the correlations between language production and comprehension scores at different linguistic levels were more extensive in the neurosurgery than in the stroke cohort. Our findings suggest that neurosurgery-induced language impairments do not correspond to those caused by stroke, but rather manifest as a ‘moderate global aphasia’ – a generalized decline of language processing abilities.

We outlined in chapter 1 the goals of this survey of number across a diverse sample of languages: investigate the properties of number systems in some depth, while at the same time guaranteeing direct comparability between the analyses of systems that can be very different from each other. At the conclusion of this survey, it is appropriate to consider what picture emerges from it. We will structure our answer in three steps. First, in section 2, we briefly review the main results arising from the chapters in this volume, and we organize the typology of number values that emerge from them. Most of these considerations broadly confirm what is generally known (or assumed) about the expression, content, and variation space of number systems across natural languages. The next sections, from 3 to 7, discuss in greater depth and in a more analytical perspective some important themes, especially focusing on issues that can shed new light or contribute to current understanding of number systems. Finally, section 8 offers a wrap-up discussion and points to desiderata that arise from these studies.

The volume is devoted to the typology of the category of number in the world's languages.

The chapter provides a detailed description of the expression of number in West Circassian.

The paper describes expressions with the meaning ‘other’ in East Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestanian) languages. It is shown that four main strategies can be distinguished: i) the ‘one’-based strategy: ‘other’ includes the numeral ‘one’; ii) the demonstrative-based strategy: ‘other’ includes a demonstrative pronoun; iii) the mixed demonstrative-based + ‘one’-based strategy: ‘other’ includes both a demonstrative and the numeral ‘one’; and iv) the lexical strategy: ‘other’ is a dedicated adjective (pronoun), not necessarily derived from any other clearly discernable source.

Enhanced Universal Dependencies (EUD) are enhanced graphs expressed on top of basic dependency trees. EUD support repre- sentation of deeper syntactic relations in constructions such as coordi- nation, gapping, relative clauses, and argument sharing through control and raising. The paper presents experiments on the EUD parsing of the low-resource Belarusian language, for which no corpora with enhanced annotations were available.

Models trained on the Universal Dependencies treebanks of two closely related Slavic languages, Russian and Ukrainian, were used to parse sen- tences translated from Belarusian. After that, EUD were projected to the original sentences, which gave us ELAS (Enhanced Labeled Attach- ment Score) 78.1% for both Russian and Ukrainian in evaluation. We also trained a model of one of the IWPT 2020 Shared Task participants on obtained the annotations in Belarusian and achieved ELAS 83.4%. The analysis shows that the most common mistakes of cross-lingual parsing are rooted in different theoretical perspectives and practice approaches to the annotation of particular types of clauses in the three Slavic treebanks. Russian and Ukrainian EUD transfer models tend to make mistakes when dealing with the predicate argument relations, which are hard to iden- tify without understanding the semantics of the sentence. The alignment method decreases the quality of the annotation by confusing tokens that occur in a sentence more than once.

This paper develops the claim that head properties arise (at least) due to one of the three factors: (i) the higher position of an element in a compositional structure, (ii) the informational prominence, and (iii) the development of a construction from an appositive(-like) structure. These factors are logically independent and may lead to the assignment of head properties to different elements of a construction. As a result, it is more accurate to speak not of the heads but rather of head effects, which may – but need not – concentrate around a single component of a construction.

This paper discusses the frame method developed by Moscow lexical typology group in application to pragmatic constructions, namely, discourse formulae (idiomatic answers like Fair enough or You bet!). The methods of data collection and analysis are illustrated with a case study of negative discourse formulae in four Slavic languages. The study shows how the field of negation is organized, and how answering strategies differ in Russian, Polish, Slovene and Serbian. The results are addressed from the point of view of the theory of speech acts.

This paper experimentally investigates the role of veridicality and the cause-effect relation in the derivation of (i) Conditional Perfection and (ii) logical entailment in Russian esli-conditionals and raz-conditionals. It provides further evidence that Conditional Perfection is a structurally defined phenomenon. Moreover, it presents a cross-linguistic and intra-linguistic variation in conditional connectives used in indicative and subjunctive counterfactual conditionals. Finally, confirming the causal network theory proposed in Schulz (2007), the paper points out that effect-to-cause subjunctive counterfactuals are less acceptable than cause-to-effect ones.

West Circassian has no less than two imperatives and two optatives. Their distribution depends on various parameters such as the speaker’s control over the situation, the person of the topic and the type of a predicate. The whole system arguably can be described with respect to the universal Imperative Prototype, which reflects grammaticalization of a discourse function.

This paper describes some aspects of the West Circassian Corpus, an electronic resource containing annotated texts in West Circassian (Adyghe). We focus on some ways in which the corpus can serve as an important instrument for teaching West Circassian. In particular, it is shown that the West Circassian Corpus can be used for compiling the exercises, for checking the actual use of the language as well as for organizing small-scale research projects devoted to the functioning of West Circassian. The paper contains some examples of the use of the West Circassian Corpus for teaching purposes.

This paper argues that there are at least two adnominal possessive contructions in the Kazym dialect of Northern Khanty, both of which are exponed by the same set of suffixes. The arguments for this view include the (un)availability of explicit possessor mention, the presence of a uniqueness requirement, and the availability of context-dependent associative possessive interpretations as opposed to proper possessive ones, based in the notion of ownership and derived from the semantics of the given NP. The observed possessive system is typologically unusual, although we expect that similar systems can be shown to exist in neighboring and related languages with extended associative possessive marking.

Using written texts elicited from students with different proficiency levels, we studied the acquisition of nominal cases in Russian as a second language. We established the order in which cases were acquired (nominative, locative, accusative, genitive, instrumental, and dative), as well as certain characteristics of their acquisition trajectories. We argue that the order of acquisition is determined by two groups of factors: how essential a given case is for successful language use and how complex it is, both semantically and morphologically. Many important differences between first and second language acquisition were identified. The maturation of the case system was observed both in the number of correct forms participants produced and in error rates. The distribution of correct forms changed, gradually approaching that found for native speakers. With growth in proficiency, the incidence of different error types declined, and the relative frequency of errors more characteristic of first language acquisition increased.

The task of the semantic role labeling usually focuses on identifying and classifying the core, obligatory argu­ ments of the predicate. The adjuncts of Time, Location, etc. (non­core, modifier arguments) are considered on the periphery of the task [30] and even doing the easy part of it [44], despite the fact that they are highly integrated into the clause structure and may non­trivially interact with the meaning of the verb [4, 32]. In this paper, we present experiments on labeling the adjunct roles of LOCATION, TIME, MANNER, DEGREE, REASON, and PURPOSE, based on the manually annotated Adjuncts­FrameBank data set. The results show an average F1­score of 0.94 on the gold adjunct phrase annotations using the word2vec representations of adjuncts, word2vec representations of pre­ dicates, and the moprhosyntactic marking of adjuncts. Our findings generally corroborate the theoretical hypothesis on the structural and semantic autonomy and lexico­morphosyntactic specialization of adjuncts. Yet, more com­ plicated organization of their network is revealed, pointing to the diversity of adjuncts in terms of their distribution and behavior.

Bjorkman & Zeijlstra (2018) claim that agreement with the absolutive argument in ergative-absolutive languages follows naturally in an Upwards-Agree (UA) system supplemented by the relation of Accessibility if 𝜙-agreement is parasitic on structural case assigned to the absolutive noun phrase either by T or by v. By drawing evidence from two distantly related East Caucasian languages, Mehweb and Avar, this article shows this view to be erroneous while also fine-tuning the consensus view, due to Legate 2008, of the nature of the absolutive case. I then show that the problematic facts are trivially analyzable with standard Agree (Chomsky 2000 et seq.).

The article considers a lemmatiser that is developed specifically for Old Church Slavonic (OCS). The introduction underlines the problem of the lack of lemmatisers that might deal with different datasets of the OCS. The review gives a short description of previous attempts and current trends in lemmatisation. The lemmatiser is hybrid-based and uses the advantages of linguistic rules for specific cases (fragmentary tokens, punctuation, or digits), a dictionary for the most common tokens, and a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) neural network with an attention mechanism for the rest of material. The model achieves an 85% overall accuracy score, which is lower than one of the previous models for the Universal Dependencies(UD) dataset. However, when specific tokens are taken into consideration, the model outperforms the previous ones with the help of its rule-based part. Possible further directions of the research include the use of more sophisticated architectures, such as BART.

This paper describes the development of a free/open-source computational morphological description for K’iche’, a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala. The language is of the agglutinative morphological type, with both prefixing and suffixing morphology. Both the nominal and verbal morphology are moderately complex. K’iche’ is under-resourced and this is the first publication describing a computational tool for the language, and one of the first publications describing a computational tool for any language of the Mayan group. We use the Helsinki Finite-State Toolkit (HFST) for implementing the finite-state transducer. An automatic evaluation of the coverage of our implementation shows that the coverage is adequate, between 86% and 96% on range of freely available corpora. A manual evaluation gives a recall of over 90% over a hand-annotated test set. Both the analyser and the hand-annotated test set are available under a free/open-source licence.

Interaction between people is a cornerstone of being human. Despite huge developments in languages and communicative skills, interaction often fails, which causes problems and costs in everyday life and work. An inability to conduct dialogue also produces conflicts between groups of people, states and religions. Therefore, there are good reasons to claim that miscommunication and failures in interaction are among the most serious problems in the world. Researchers from different fields – linguistics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, brain research, philosophy – have tried to tackle this complex phenomenon. Their method-driven approaches enrich our understanding of the features of interaction in many ways. However, what is lacking is an understanding of the very essence of interaction, which needs a more holistic, phenomenon-driven approach. The aim of this paper is to show that the only way to reach this goal is multidisciplinarity, that is, using the results and methods of different fields of research. This is not an easy goal and task because the way of thinking and doing research varies greatly discipline-wise. A further obstacle is the researchers’ training, which, as a rule, focuses on the tradition of only one field of research. The Multidimensional Model of Interaction provides a good framework for a more holistic approach to interaction by viewing the complex phenomenon from different angles. The model includes various phases of the process of interaction, beginning with the choice of the topic by the speaker and ending with identification of the reference by the recipient, as well as the mental worlds of the interlocutors (knowledge, attitudes, values, emotional state etc.), recipient design (accommodation of speech) and external circumstances.

We present a hybrid HMM-based PoS tagger for Old Church Slavonic. The training corpus is a portion of one text, Codex Marianus (40k) annotated with the Universal Dependencies UPOS tags in the UD-PROIEL treebank. We perform a number of experiments in within-domain and out-of-domain settings, in which the remaining part of Codex Marianus serves as a within-domain test set, and Kiev Folia is used as an out-of- domain test set. Analysing by-PoS-class precision and sensitivity in each run, we combine a simple context-free n-gram-based approach and Hidden Markov method (HMM), and added linguistic rules for specific cases such as punctuation and digits. While the model achieves a rather non-impressive accuracy of 81% in in-domain settings, we observe an accuracy of 51% in out-of-domain evaluation, which is comparable to the results of large neural architectures based on pre-trained contextual embeddings.