Proceedings of Third Workshop "Computational linguistics and language science"

My book examines the function and development of the cult of saints in Coptic Egypt. For this purpose I focus primarily on the material provided by the texts forming the Coptic hagiographical tradition of the early Christian martyr Philotheus of Antioch, and more specifically – the Martyrdom of St Philotheus of Antioch (Pierpont Morgan M583). This Martyrdom is a reflection of a once flourishing cult which is attested in Egypt by rich textual and material evidence. This text enjoyed great popularity not only in Egypt, but also in other countries of the Christian East, since his dossier includes texts in Coptic, Georgian, Ethiopic, and Arabic. This work examines the literary and historical background of the Martyrdom of Philotheus and similar hagiographical texts. It also explores the goals and concerns of the authors and editors of Coptic martyr passions and their intended audience. I am arguing that these texts were produced in order to perform multiple functions: to justify and promote the cult of a particular saint, as an educational tool, and as an important structural element of liturgical celebrations in honour of the saint.

The given book is aimed at bachelor students for Law facultywhoo need to create a project proposal for their Final paaper. Inthis book students will find recommendations for writinf research proposals and samples of papers with detailed analysis , exercises and theoretical framework. The students will be able to present the results of their scintific studies either in oral or wriiten form.

Linguists have long classified languages according to the ways in which their intransitive subjects, transitive subjects, and direct objects align with respect to case marking and/or agreement. The two main divisions are known as the (nominative–)accusative and ergative(–absolutive) alignments.  Under an accusative alignment pattern, the intransitive subject (abbreviated here as S) and the transitive subject (A: for agent, or agent-like argument) are encoded the same way (nominative), while the transitive direct object (O) is encoded separately (accusative). Under an ergative alignment pattern, on the other hand, S and O have identical encoding (absolutive) while A has its own separate case (ergative); see Comrie (1978); Dixon (1979; 1994); Manning (1996); Aldridge (2008); McGregor (2009); among others. These alignments can be expressed not only through case marking but also through agreement; S and A may determine the same agreement, in contrast to O, or S and O may license the same agreement, in contrast to A.

The book comprises study materials for learning English. It aims at developing students' communication skills which are necessary for using English in every day life and professional activities. The book provides learners with extra opportunities for developing their listening, pronunciation, vocabulary and speaking skills through the use of authentic video content selected in accordance with the requirements of the ESL course.

The resource book is a collection of twelve lessons based on a selection of TED talks about different aspects of modern life. The selected TED talks not only enhance the learners’ English language proficiency but also develop the learners’ professional competencies and expand their outlook.  All the lessons have a regular structure and include exercises for developing vocabulary, listening, reading, speaking, note-taking and writing skills. A quick test has been developed for each lesson checking the student’s assimilation of the material.  Through authentic models of effective communication, students build fluency to achieve academic and personal success. The resource book can be used both for classroom activities and for independent work. 

The book is devoted to qualifying parts of speech: adjective and adverb.

The book is devoted to linguistic problems of professional information exchange among specialists of various fields. 

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language, AINL 2018, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in October 2018. The 19 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 56 submissions and cover a wide range of topics, including morphology and word-level semantics, sentence and discourse representations, corpus linguistics, language resources, and social interaction analysis. 

"Zholkovsky’s work—vast in scope and eclectic in methodology—has long been humanizing semiotics in both the Russian and American academy, giving it a face, a sense of humor, a stake in the real worlds we live by, but never losing its structuralist bedrock. The essays collected here, which range from Pushkin to Fyodor Karamazov, Okudzhava and Sedakova, from Peter the Great’s scandals abroad to Russian literary theory and filmmaking at home, are a goldmine by leading Slavists in North America, Europe, and Russia. A huge book of brilliant nuggets, it lights up the contours of our field today while paying perfect vignette-like tribute to Alik’s long non-conformist career, as fascinating and inscrutably flexible as it was often perilous.” (By Caryl Emerson). *** “This book is a wonderful gift not only for the 'jubilee celebrant' (for AZ it is impossible to imagine this phrase without quotes), but for all of us. The variety of topics, genres and authors might seem surprising were it not for the fact that this variety reflects the character of the book’s addressee. Its content, better than any manifesto or theoretical treatise, brings us good news: that a lack of intellectual inhibition, an unrestricted field of vision, and an enthusiasm that does not cloy are all so becoming to scholarship that, in essence, has as its sole palpable subject the infinity of creative choices. I have always liked Mayakovsky’s neologism: 'Do not jubilee!' (He himself, though, was very much concerned with his own anniversaries.) A / Z is completely devoid of the sedate smoothness of octogenaric jubilees, but it has a lot of panache and a spirit of intellectual adventure, and most importantly, fun. In this, the book bears a striking resemblance to its addressee.” (By Boris Gasparov).

Scandinavian motifs, both religious and related to arts and crafts, are typically deprived of their religious content in the process of Christianization as percieved in Old Rus' literature in which myths are treated as faded histories or legends.

The Caucasus is the place with the greatest linguistic variation in Europe. The present volume explores this variation within the tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality systems in the languages of the North-East Caucasian (or Nakh-Daghestanian) family. The papers of the volume cover the most challenging and typologically interesting features such as aspect and the complicated interaction of aspectual oppositions expressed by stem allomorphy and inflectional paradigms, grammaticalized evidentiality and mirativity, and the semantics of rare verbal categories such as the deliberative (‘May I go?’), the noncurative (‘Let him go, I don’t care’), different types of habituals (gnomic, qualitative, non-generic), and perfective tenses (aorist, perfect, resultative). The book offers an overview of these features in order to gain a broader picture of the verbal semantics covering the whole North-East Caucasian family. At the same time it provides in-depth studies of the most fascinating phenomena.

The volume presents several papers on Mehweb, a one-village language spoken in the central part of Daghestan, a republic of the Russian Federation.

Since the advent of digitization, the conceptual confusion surrounding the semantic galaxy that comprises the media and journalism universes has increased. Journalism across several media platforms provides rapidly expanding content and audience engagement that assist in enhancing the journalistic experience. Exploring Transmedia Journalism in the Digital Age provides emerging research on multimedia journalism across various platforms and formats using digital technologies. While highlighting topics, such as immersive journalism, nonfictional narratives, and design practice, this book explores the theoretical and critical approaches to journalism through the lens of various technologies and media platforms. This book is an important resource for scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and media professionals seeking current research on media expansion and participatory journalism.

This edited collection presents a range of methods that can be used to analyse linguistic data quantitatively. A series of case studies of Russian data spanning different aspects of modern linguistics serve as the basis for a discussion of methodological and theoretical issues in linguistic data analysis. The book presents current trends in quantitative linguistics, evaluates methods and presents the advantages and disadvantages of each. The chapters contain introductions to the methods and relevant references for further reading.

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.

This book explores how artistic strategies of resistance have survived under the conservative-authoritarian regime which has been in place in Russia since 2012. It discusses the conditions under which artists work as the state spells out a new state cultural policy, aesthetics change and the state attempts to define what constitutes good taste. It examines the approaches artists are adopting to resist state oppression and to question the present system and attitudes to art. The book addresses a wide range of issues related to these themes, considers the work of individual artists and includes besides its focus on the visual arts also some discussion of contemporary theatre. The book is interdisciplinary: its authors include artists, art historians, theatre critics, historians, linguists, sociologists and political scientists from Russia, Europe and the United States.

This book aims at developing reserahc writing skills of students. The two key genres of an empirical research paper and a research proposal are used as a basis to develop researcg communication skills. 

The research observes the representation of the alien city chronotope in Jazz (1992) by a contemporary American writer Toni Morrison. The narration of the novel occurs in Harlem (New York) in the 1920-s, however, because most characters’ identities originate in the mid-19th-century American South, time and space frames extend. Focusing on the city space in the novel Jazz we regard the city as a social and cultural phenomenon of America, an independent live character that enters into a dialogue with the novel’s protagonists and, at the same time, contributes to their alienation within its frames. Harlem of 1920s functions not only as sociohistorical background but also as a unique narrator that relates the urban experience of African-Americans. We deduce that the chronotope exhibited in the novel in question combines several places and embodies narration about protagonists’ roots, their original habitat and a new conflicting environment that both attracts and repels them. The intrinsic ties of time and space in the literary work discussed in the article are presented on the level of the city, which represents alien and fragmentized reality. Thus we are convinced that the alien city chronotope in the novel is shaped by the opposition of ethnic and cultural identities of characters within their changing world. The characters’ illusions and aspirations are guided by the dubious and forceful voice of the city and none of the protagonists is able to escape the traumatic labyrinth of time and space tracing their memory

The article analyses how L.Tieck understood the phenomena of the traditional narratives. The article discusses the views Tieck had upon the chapbook, and its adaptations in his works, particularly the drama based upon popular material. Three of his dramatic works of that type, «Life and death of the St. Genivieve» (1800), «Emperor Octavian» (1808) and «Fortunatus» (1815), especially the first one, initiated new genres of German Romantic drama called Universaldrama (drama of the universe), which are typologically close to mystery play. Tieck's literary program combined both the rejection of contemporary mass literature and the productive replacement of it with examples of new Romantic art. The contradiction between reality and fiction, which is accentuated in Tieck's comedies, weakens in his Universaldramen. The main theme of his plays is the interpretation of religion as a way to comprehend the world. The poet creates a kind of genre complex, where the drama of historical process is ironically removed. This is the basic principle of his two first big plays – “Life and death of the St. Genivieve” and “Emperor Octavian”. His last play, “Fortunatus” is, however, rather a generalizing "ironic construct" which combines elements of several traditional genres and, at the same time, is a parody of the genre he created.

Academic bibliography of Syriac and Christian Arabic Studies in Russian.

Basil of Caesarea’s treatment of the life of Moses in his Hexaemeron is traditionally taken to be dependent on Philo of Alexandria and the Jewish exegetical tradition. Without questioning the fact that Basil knew Philo’s Life of Moses, this paper seeks to demonstrate, however, that in this respect Basil was more indebted to Origen and his tripartite division of philosophy into ethics, physics, and epoptics. This allows not only to make a more balanced assessment of Origen’s influence on Basil, increasingly stressed in recent scholarship, but also to suggest a more nuanced interpretation of Basil’s Address to the youth and his program of the Christian paideia.

Agrammatism in aphasia is not a homogeneous syndrome, but a characterization of a nonuniform set of language behaviors in which grammatical markers and complex syntactic structures are omitted, simplified, or misinterpreted. In a sample of 71 left-hemisphere stroke survivors, syntactic processing was quantifiedwith theNorthwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS). Classification analyses were used to assess the relation between NAVS performance and morphosyntactically reduced speech in picture descriptions. Voxel-based and connectivity-based lesion-symptom mapping were applied to investigate neural correlates of impaired syntactic processing. Despite a nonrandom correspondence between NAVS performance and morphosyntactic production deficits, there was variation in individual patterns of syntactic processing. Morphosyntactically reduced production was predicted by lesions to left-hemisphere inferior frontal cortex. Impaired verb argument structure production was predicted by damage to left-hemisphere posterior superior temporal and angular gyrus, as well as to a ventral pathway between temporal and frontal cortex. Damage to this pathway was also predictive of impaired sentence comprehension and production, particularly of noncanonical sentences. Although agrammatic speech production is primarily predicted by lesions to inferior frontal cortex, other aspects of syntactic processing rely rather on regional integrity in temporoparietal cortex and the ventral stream.

Relying upon the data from the Russian National Corpus, the paper studies Russian wh-exclamatives with and without predicates. Firstly, it makes a list of wh-exclamatives with each of the following eight wh-words: do čego, kak, kakoj, kakov, naskol’ko, skol’, skol’ko, čto za. Secondly, on the basis of the corpus frequencies of the established wh-exclamatives, it shows that those wh-exclamatives that involve NPs predominantly occur without predicates, whereas those wh-exclamatives that do not involve NPs predominantly occur with predicates. Thirdly, the paper reveals that without-predicates wh-exclamatives are mostly Nominative marked and their most frequent type, kakoj-exclamatives, involves either a scalar adjective or a scalar noun, if an NP lacks an adjective. Last but not least, the paper demonstrates which wh-constructions function only as exclamatives, that is, which of them are E-only in terms of Portner and Zanuttini (2003).

Narrative competence is an essential part of language proficiency. Research of narrative competence has both a theoretical and empirical value. Our study aims to assess narrative competence of adult L2 Russian learners and to investigate the relationship between their narrative competence and their language proficiency. For assessment, we used the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives adapted for the Russian language. We also designed a scale for assessing microstructure in Russian narratives. The study uses both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The results show that macrostructural narrative subcompetence of L2 Russian learners does not depend on their language proficiency (except for an ability to produce structurally shorter episodes at higher level) and microstructural narrative subcompetence of L2 Russian learners depends on their language proficiency only in some ways. Our study contributes to the theory of narrative competence in L2 acquisition.

The paper is focused on Vsevolod Meyerhold’s film “Picture of Dorian Gray”, a screen version of Oscar Wilde’s novel released in 1915. This famous film is considered to be lost, yet one can learn of it using various sources: a film script, a list of intertitres and other documents held in RGALI, a libretto, stills published in the press, film reviews and memoirs. These sources can help to reconstruct film structure. Historical context of the film will also be discussed. Meyerhold seems to have used many translations of Oscar Wilde’s novel and some theatrical adaptations of Oscar Wilde in Russia before 1915. It is argued that Basil Hallward for Meyerhold was an autobiographical character as well as Lord Henry played by Meyerhold himself. Thus Meyerhold’s approach to the novel is similar to that of Oscar Wilde’s: the writer called himself a prototype of all three main characters. “Picture of Dorian Gray” (1915) may be considered to be the portrait of its author, theatre and film director Vsevolod Meyerhold.

This paper focus on periphrastic nominalization — a construction which has nominal external syntax and which is used to express complement clauses. In this paper we examine the morphological and syntactic properties of this construction and compare those properties with those of typical nominalizations. In particular, a classification of nominalization into processes and results is used as the basis for comparison. As it is a crucial point regarding the contrast between a word and a construction, we also discuss whether the periphrastic nominalization shows signs of grammaticalization.

This paper deals with the productive morphological causative r(ə)- in Abaza (Northwest Caucasian), a highly polysynthetic ergative language. We discuss the causativization process in Abaza as well as the semantic properties of the construction and elaborate an analysis of the event structure of the Abaza morphological causatives based on the scope of adverbials.

This paper describes a group of derivational verbal suffixes in Abaza, a polysynthetic language belonging to the Northwest Caucasian family. For each suffix I propose a short description of its most remarkable features. In particular, I discuss the polysemy of the refactive and assertive markers and their interaction with the event structure of the verb. Other suffixes such as the putative and inferential markers are interesting due to their peculiar morphological behavior. The diversity of the discussed affixes is tentatively explained by the different pathways of their morphological and semantic development.

The paper focuses on the syntax of noun phrases in Chukchi (Chukokto-Kamchatkan). In Chukchi, structure of noun phrases is drastically different dependent on the case of  its head in several respects: we discuss expression of number, incorporation of adnominal dependents and order of constituent. We suggest several order hierarchies, which can partially explain the observed facts.

A data analysis tool of the Corpus of Russian Poetry (a part of the Russian National Corpus) is designed for quantitative research in various areas of versology and linguistics aspects of poetic texts. The core part, a statistic database of the corpus, includes annotation at the level of texts, verses, words as well as patterns of words, letters and stress. The tool allows a user to study certain properties (e. g. rhyming patterns, lexical co-occurrence) taken alone and in their interaction, both in the whole corpus and in subcorpora. Besides that, it facilitates contrastive studies of two chosen subcorpora and a few case studies demonstrating applicable methods and potential for further research in the field of the Digital literary studies.

The poetic texts pose a challenge to full morphological tagging and lemmatization since the authors seek to extend the vocabulary, employ morphologically and semantically deficient forms, go beyond standard syntactic templates, use non-projective constructions and non-standard word order, among other techniques of the creative language game. In this paper we evaluate a number of probabilistic taggers based on decision trees, CRF and neural network algorithms as well as one state-of-the-art dictionary-based tagger. The taggers were trained on prosaic texts and tested on three poetic samples of different complexity. Firstly, we discuss the method to compile the gold standard datasets for the Russian poetry. Secondly, we evaluate the taggers’ performance in the identification of the part of speech tags and lemmas. Finally, we analyze different types of errors in the taggers’ output. We analyse the confusion matrix of the parts of speech and mismatches in lemma annotation.

The article deals with the method of automatic detection of authors ' gender identity on the material of fiction prose of 1980-2000. During this period, there is a special construct, called "women's prose", which is characterized by a special genre and stylistic originality. We set ourselves the task to find out whether the concept of “women's prose” refers only to the non-text reality or is clearly reflected at the level of language. We have collected corpus of texts 1980-2000 and conducted that identified the most effective machine learning algorithms for the classification of male and female prose.

This work aims at investigating the word order within the nominal domain in Russian Sign Language (RSL) with respect to Universal 20 and a hierarchy of adjectives. Universal 20 proposed by Greenberg (1963) postulates that there are three possibilities of the word order in the noun phrase, namely Demonstrative > Numeral > Adjective > Noun, Noun > Demonstrative > Numeral > Adjective, and Noun > Adjective > Numeral > Demonstrative. Later Cinque (2005) extended the definition of Universal 20 by proposing that actually 14 word orders can be derived from the base-generated word order Demonstrative > Numeral > Adjective > Noun, and, therefore, 14 word orders are acceptable. In addition to that, Scott (2002) proposed that adjectives of different semantic types also have a universal order. In this work we compare RSL data with these hierarchies and conclude that the underlying word order in RSL conforms to Scott's (2002) hierarchy and to Cinque's (2005) definition of Universal 20. In order to derive the underlying word order for RSL we explore which word orders are acceptable, which are unacceptable, and which of the attested word orders are the most neutral. Moreover, we explain the variability of the attested in RSL word orders with the number of modifiers by noun (single modifiers occur in preposition more often than multiple modifiers).

This study deals with the politeness strategies of speakers of Russian, focusing on verbal expression of politeness. After running a field survey in schools in mid-2018, we try to analyze specific verbal markers of expressing politeness quantitatively. Four such markers were selected for this study, namely greeting, leave-taking, expressing gratitude and apology. Quantitative analysis shows that there is a clear frequency pattern found in these markers’ use, indicating a relatively high degree of sociolinguistic variation. Possible causes of this effect are discussed, including cultural diversity and multilingual setting of the modern Russian school communicative domain.

In this paper, a description of sentential negation makers in Russian Sign Language (RSL) is provided. Two types of these markers exist. The first one is a negative sign – a manual negator. The second type is markers that are expressed by facial expressions, and head movements – non-manual negation. Moreover, this observation of sentential negation presents the frequency of manual negators, and the distribution of non-manual negation. The data also shows that in negative constructions the basic word order changes. In addition, I offer an analysis that deals with this phenomenon.

The paper deals with the intonation of native speakers of several regional variants of Russian. I analyze how simple characteristics of pitch movement are connected to biological sex, age, place of living, and type of spontaneous text. According to my primary hypothesis, the distribution of pitch in “low”, “middle” and “high” parts of the pitch range and the number of movements from one range into other ones can predict the aforementioned characteristics of the recordings as well as reveal the individual characteristics of speakers (Vol’skaya 2014, Féry 2017). I demonstrate that in my model the only significant parameter is the biological sex of the speakers, which means that this distribution is unlikely to be determined by the regional differences. The study has been conducted as a part of the project on statistical analysis of regional variants of Standard Russian and minority languages of Russia.

In the early 19th century the words predanie, legenda, and skazanie started to be used by Russian writers as a generic label. The present paper considers the texts with these labels in their titles or subtitles written by Vladimir Odoevsky. First, constituent features of the corpus of the texts labeled as predanie are identified. Then the same categories are explored in the texts marked as legenda and skazanie. The aim of the research is to ascertain whether these texts are built according to similar or different generic patterns. I argue that Odoevsky treated the notions differently, and the generically labelled texts reveal different genre strategies.

Although conflict representation in media has been widely studied, few attempts have been made to perform large-scale comparisons of agendas in the media of conflicting parties, especially for armed country-level confrontations. In this paper, we introduce quantitative evidence of agenda divergence between the media of conflicting parties in the course of the Ukrainian crisis 2013-2014. Using 45,000 messages from the online newsfeeds of a Russian and a Ukrainian TV channels, we perform topic modelling coupled with qualitative analysis to reveal crisis-related topics, assess their salience and map evolution of attention of both channels to each of those topics. We find that the two channels produce fundamentally different agenda sequences: in particular, while the Russian channel pays little attention to confrontation between the Ukrainian government and the opposition before the regime change, the Ukrainian channel is less inclined to cover armed violence in East Ukraine and refugees after the regime change.

The main way to mark the direct object in Russian dialects is the accusative case, but in some constructions the NP in direct object position marked by the nominative case. This case considered in the paper like case of Differential Object Marking (DOM) phenomenon, where NP in direct object position in certain conditions can be marked by the nominative case, but in “normal” conditions it marked by accusative case. The study describes this phenomenon in the North Russian dialects. Some different syntactic constructions with the nominative objects considered from the point of the DOM features: animacy, definiteness, word order, information structure, modality of predicates. In addition, the paper describes the issue of historical development of the constructions and the issue about syntactic status.

The topics explored in this essay include Ivan Andreevich Krylov’s reading practices in his young and mature years, reconstructed on the basis of various sources. The paper recontextualizes Krylov’s unique reading trajectory not always comprehensible for his contemporaries. It also highlights numerous links, not accentuated earlier, between Krylov’s strategies — in life, writing and publishing — and his service as a librarian in the Imperial Public Library of St. Petersburg. The analysis of several situations showing Krylov as a brilliant reciter of his own texts who smartly deals with expectations and obsessions of his audience allows to affirms the existence a special connection, of his personality, considerably mythologized due to his own efforts, the literary genre of fable and the status of classical writer obtained by Krylov by 1830. Sub specie of this connection the transformations of the circle of Krylov’s readers are represented, as well as different ways of perception of his fables by children.

The paper presents a Universal Dependencies (UD) annotation scheme for a learner English corpus. The REALEC dataset consists of essays written in English by Russian-speaking university students in the course of general English. The essays are a part of students' preparation for the independent final examination similar to the international English exam. While adjusting existing dependency parsing tools to a learner data, one has to take into account to what extent students' mistakes provoke errors in the parser output. The ungrammatical and stylistically inappropriate utterances may challenge parsers' algorithms trained on grammatically appropriate written texts. In our experiments, we compared the output of the dependency parser UDpipe (trained on UD-English 2.0) with the results of manual parsing, placing a particular focus on parses of ungrammatical English clauses. We show how mistakes made by students influence the work of the parser. Overall, UDpipe performed reasonably well (UAS 92.9, LAS 91.7). The following cases cause the errors in automatic annotation a) incorrect detection of a head, b) incorrect detection of the relation type, as well as c) both. We propose some solutions which could improve the automatic output and thus make the assessment of syntactic complexity more reliable.

Learner corpora have great potential as sources of educational material. If a corpus contains annotations of mistakes in student works, it can be of use for the recognition and analysis of the most common error patterns. The error-annotation system of the learner corpus REALEC makes it possible to automatically generate different types of test questions and thus form exercises from the corpus data. This paper describes the creation of an automatic multiple-choice generator which works with the specific types of the student errors annotated in the texts of examination essays.

The paper discusses the main uses of a synthetic causative marker in Chukchi with special reference to non-causative effects of causative morphology. The causative morpheme expresses general causation when attached to patientive intransitive and some agentive intransitive predicates, namely verbs of directed motion, change of posture and ingestion. Other agentive predicates, intransitive as well as transitive, resist causativization and receive some non-causative interpretation if they form causatives. Such causative verbs usually have applicative-like or rearranging functions.