Slavic Languages and Societies Commons^™

Morphosemantic Integration Of -Ing Anglicisms Into Russian And Kazakh In The Context Of Trilingual Code-Switching, Timur Akishev

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The current dissertation is an attempt to determine and describe the characteristics of the process of linguistic integration of English noun loans into Russian and Kazakh. One of the main objectives that my study was guided by was the analysis of the relationships between or across the linguistic and quantitative parameters of the loans based on the data drawn from the Russian National Corpus, an online database containing multiple examples of using the Russian language. Another important objective of the research conducted was to provide a holistic interpretation to the process of secondary adaptation of the nominal Anglicisms from Russian …

Russian And Ukrainian: Like Two Drops Of Water, Elizabeth Edwards

Student Research Submissions

Ukraine and Russia, both in the international spotlight, have similar national languages that are often misrepresented as being entirely mutually intelligible. While both languages do, in fact, have the same lineage, Ukraine has, over time, developed linguistic independence in a distinct language separate from Russian. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has renewed public interest in both the Ukrainian and Russian languages, but there are still stark differences, both socio-politically and linguistically, which are not widely known or appreciated. A brief, historical description of a few lexical, phonological, and orthographic differences between the two languages can illustrate the importance of …

Online Appendix: Who Are(N’T) Our Students?, Dianna Murphy, Hadis Ghaedi

ScholarsArchive Data

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The document is an appendix to the article "Who Are(n’t) Our Students?" by Dianna Murphy, Hadis Ghaedi published in RLJ Vol. 71, No. 3 . It provides high-resolution images which, due to their large size, are not legible in the print edition.

Russian Peasants In Tolstoy’S War And Peace - Idealized And Instrumentalized, Antonia Seyfarth

The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

In War and Peace, Tolstoy challenges Western European notions of Russian backwardness and ‘barbarity’ through his depiction of the virtuousness, spiritual wisdom, and rich cultural traditions of the common Russian people. This idealized portrayal of Russian peasants and soldiers is essential to Tolstoy’s construction of a Russian national myth that unites members of all social classes behind a shared set of values. However, in turning the Russian peasantry into idealized, oversimplified caricatures that lack individuality, complexity, agency, and the ability for critical thought, Tolstoy reduces these characters to mere instruments that provide morally edifying lessons to Russia’s elites. This imposition …

The Production Of Russian Vowels /I/ And /Ɨ/ By Russian-English Bilingual Children, Evgeniya Maryutina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is the first to investigate the production of the Russian vowel contrast /i/-/ɨ/ by Russian-English bilingual children living in New York City. This contrast is interesting because the vowel /ɨ/ is not unanimously recognized as an independent phoneme, based on e.g. its limited occurrence and distribution (Kodzasov & Krivnova, 2010; Matusevich, 1976). Additionally, Russian-speaking children acquire /ɨ/ relatively late in production. Therefore, this contrast’s acquisition may be particularly challenging for bilingual children with more limited exposure and variability in their input and is an interesting test case and contribution to the debate regarding the contrast’s phonological status. In …

Acquisition Orders And Instructional Sequences: A Case Study Of Russian Textbooks, Olga Ozhiganova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous research on English as a second language has established the linguistic phenomenon of the natural order of morpheme acquisition in which grammatical features are acquired by learners in a specific order. The acquisition of Russian morphosyntax as an L2 had not been established until Gor’s (2019) research. The present study employs Gor’s (2019) findings to examine whether the order in which five Russian morphosyntactic features—case, impersonal sentences, location-direction, aspect, verbs of motion (VoM)—are acquired is reflected in second-year Russian instructional materials by investigating three commonly used textbooks. The results reveal that (1) the documented order in which Russian morphosyntactic …

A Primer For Beginning Russian, Dasha Culic Nisula

Books Written by World Languages and Literatures Faculty

A two week introductory course to the teaching of Russian featuring lessons, exercises, and supplements.

Russian Language Use In The United States: Demographics And Implications, Julie Brock

Posters-at-the-Capitol Presentations

As a large nation covering 1/9 of the Earth’s surface, Russia and its language necessarily draw linguistic attention. Between the time of the Russian Revolution (1917) until now, Russian speakers (both from Russia itself and former Soviet territories) immigrated to the United States in four or five waves. Russian is currently identified as one of the world’s Critical Languages, according to the U.S. State Department. U.S. Census data indicate that Russian language spoken in respondents’ homes increased by 393% between 1980-2010, with just under a million people speaking Russian in their homes in 2011. English language use among this population …

Intertextuality, Aesthetics, And The Digital: Rediscovering Chekhov In Early British Modernism, Sam Jacob

Modernist Short Story Project

Mark Halliday’s poem, “Chekhov,” published in 1992, raises a simple yet profound question regarding the Russian playwright and author, Anton Chekhov: What do we get from Chekhov? Considering the present article’s particular focus, Halliday’s query may be used to ask how Chekhov influenced early modernist writers (circa 1900-1930) from the British literary context. However, when considering the amount of scholarly work devoted to this question, the initial simplicity of Halliday’s inquiry evaporates, giving way to a breadth of complexity, nuance, and ambiguity. Such ambiguity has led scholars attempting to trace the intertextual convergence between Chekhov and the early modernist writers …

Heritage Language Learners Of Russian And L2 Learners In The Flagship Program: A Comparison, Olga Kagan, Anna Kudyma

Russian Language Journal

In 2005, a consortium of schools consisting of Bryn Mawr College, University of Maryland, University of California Los Angeles, and Middlebury Summer School was formed in order to launch a Russian Flagship Program. Both participants and NSEP 1 felt that these universities would bring different strengths to the program: Maryland and Bryn Mawr, for example, would attract students returning from a year-long study abroad experience in Russia as administered by American Councils, and UCLA would attract heritage language learners from large Russian communities in both Northern and Southern California. As expected, the first cohort of UCLA Flagship students consisted of …

Teaching Compassion In The Russian Language And Literature Curriculum: An Essential Learning Outcome, Benjamin Rifkin

Russian Language Journal

One of Dr. Olga E. Kagan’s most important contributions to the language education field was a reconceptualization of the perspective of the language performance of heritage speakers of Russian. In the past, heritage speakers’ language was considered deficient in all the ways in which it diverged from Contemporary Standard Russian. Their lack of formal instruction in Russian or the interruption of their formal instruction due to their immigration from a Russophone country to North America was considered the source of numerous errors and anglicisms, which the Russian language curriculum was designed to eliminate. Teachers of Russian as a foreign language …

Businessmen And Ballerinas Take Different Forms: A Strategic Resource For Acquiring Russian Vocabulary And Morphology, Laura A. Janda

Russian Language Journal

Included in the tasks facing a language learner is the acquisition of a lexicon and a grammar. However, when the target language has inflectional morphology, these two parts of the language-learning task intersect in the paradigms of grammatical word forms because each open-class lexeme has a number of forms that allow it to express various combinations of grammatical categories. Among major world languages, Russian is relatively highly inflected, meaning that the challenges of acquiring vocabulary are compounded by the need to master the inflectional morphology. Even a modest basic vocabulary of a few thousand inflected lexemes has over a hundred …

«В Каком Контексте?»: A Context-Based Approach To Teaching Verbs Of Motion, Irina Six

Russian Language Journal

Anyone who has studied or taught Russian using the textbook В пути, authored by Olga Kagan, Frank Miller, and Ganna Kudyma, is probably familiar with the following thought-provoking prompt: В каком контексте? ‘Think of a situation when you could say’: Ты звонила домой сегодня? – Ты позвонила домой сегодня? ‘Did you call [imperfective] home today? – Did you call [perfective] home today?’ or Они не приходили. – Они не пришли. ‘They did not come [imperfective]. – They did not come [perfective]’(Kagan, Miller and Kudyma 2006, 79). This is one of the rare examples of assignments where Russian as a Second …

Semantic Bias As An Application Of The Universal Grammar Model In The Russian Language, Iryna Gural

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The theory of the Universal Grammar developed by Chomsky has been known for many years. The main idea behind the theory was that the processing of the language does not depend on the culture but it universal among all the languages. Further psycholinguistic studies developed the ideas about schematic comprehension of the language, giving rise to the idea of the "garden path effect". Research focused on the processing of the ambiguous sentences and found the tendency for readers to prefer interpretations of specific sentence areas as objects. The current study summarizes the ideas of psycholinguistic study and incorporates a novel …

Using Religious Themes And Content To Affect Cultural Sensitivity In Russian Language Learning, Paul Tristan Gallo

Theses and Dissertations

Specifically oriented towards Russian culture, this study addresses the need in diplomacy for deeper cultural understanding. As research suggests a link between the inclusion of religious perspectives in second language acquisition (SLA) and student motivation and cultural empathy, this study examines how Russian language classrooms could leverage an understanding of Russian religious themes to foster cultural sensitivity. The study invited 24 second-year university students of Russian to complete a previously-validated assessment of cultural sensitivity: the Global Perspectives Inventory (GPI). Divided into a control and a treatment group, the participants also watched a short video depicting a story from Russian history …

Review: Studies In Phonological Theory And Historical Linguistics, James Joshua Pennington

Russian Language Journal

This volume represents a definitive collection of Bill Darden’s research over his career of more than forty years as a linguist. The book is divided along his main areas of expertise into two parts: (1) “Historical Linguistics,” consisting of 17 chapters that cover a variety of problematic issues in Indo-European, Balto-Slavic, and Slavic historical phonology, morphology, and syntax; and (2) “Phonological Theory,” comprising 10 articles, which illustrate Darden’s approach to tackling difficult issues in phonological theory through examples from Russian and Greenlandic.

Beheading First: On Nabokov's Translation Of Lewis Carroll, Victor Fet

Victor Fet

Anya v Strane chudes, young Nabokov’s 1923 Russian translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, contains an intentionally shifted statement “beheading first, sentence later” compared to Lewis Carroll’s “sentence first, verdict later”. The shift is fitting for the 1920s children émigré audience.

Quantifier Spreading In Child Eye Movements: A Case Of The Russian Quantifier Kazhdyj ‘Every’, Irina A. Sekerina, Antje Sauermann

Publications and Research

Extensive cross-linguistic work has documented that children up to the age of 9–10 make errors when performing a sentence-picture verification task that pairs spoken sentences with the universal quantifier every and pictures with entities in partial one-to-one correspondence. These errors stem from children’s difficulties in restricting the domain of a universal quantifier to the appropriate noun phrase and are referred in the literature as quantifier-spreading (q-spreading). We adapted the task to be performed in conjunction with eye-movement recordings using the Visual World Paradigm. Russian-speaking 5-to-6-year-old children (N = 31) listened to sentences like Kazhdyj alligator lezhit v vanne ‘Every alligator …

The Development Of Syntactic Complexity In The Writing Of Russian Language Learners: A Longitudinal Corpus Study, Olesya V. Kisselev, Anna A. Alsufieva

Russian Language Journal

To make inferences about how second language (L2) learners develop over time, most Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research has traditionally relied on cross-sectional one-time sampling design, in which data collected from different groups of learners at different levels of language proficiency are compared against a preestablished set of measures. Rarer are longitudinal studies, in which researchers track a small number of participants over a relatively long period of time. Recent developments in technology and the rise of the language corpora have made it possible to combine the benefits of these two approaches; longitudinal LEARNER LANGUAGE CORPORA, large databases collected continuously …

Review: Mezhdu Nami, Jim Sweigert

Russian Language Journal

Между нами marks a new and quite remarkable approach to the teaching and learning of Russian. In place of the typical print textbook series is an online text that also incorporates some aspects of more traditional Russian language textbooks. Indeed, this is perhaps the first time that a Russian language textbook for the North American market has provided students with an entry point that is nearly entirely in an online format. As the authors state, “Между нами is a free, web-based textbook that provides a comprehensive introduction to Russian language and culture. It is organized around the experiences of four …

Review: Studies In Accentology And Slavic Linguistics In Honor Of Ronald F. Feldstein; Exploring The Us Language Flagship Program: Professional Competence In A Second Language By Graduations, Ljiljana Durašković, Grant H. Lundberg

Russian Language Journal

As the title states, this volume was compiled in honor of the work and influence of Ronald F. Feldstein on the fields of accentology and Slavic linguistics. Though Professor Feldstein did some work in most of the areas covered in the volume, the book is unified by the ideas of the Prague Linguistic Circle and Jakobsonian structuralism, of which Feldstein was an important representative for many Slavic linguists working today.

Review: Poetry Reader For Russian Learners; Siblings In Tolstoy And Dostoevsky: The Path To Universal Brotherhood, Richard Robin, Naya Lekht

Russian Language Journal

Overall, the book does a thorough job of documentation. In proficiency terms, it reads more like a fancy “Advanced High” text than “Superior.” The authors do not speculate about the potentially more controversial conclusions pertaining to some of the postulates underlying the program until toward the end of the volume. After all, it is unlikely that a school with only two years of Russian aiming for an “Intermediate Low” speaking proficiency will create a two-year curriculum with the intent to prepare participants for a fourth year at “Advanced.” Most of the interesting speculations come in Al-Batal and Glakas’s view of …

Review: How Russian Came To Be The Way It Is. A Student Guide To The History Of The Russian Language; Studies In Accentology And Slavic Linguistics In Honor Of Ronald F. Feldstein, Ljiljana Durašković

Russian Language Journal

Tore Nesset is professor of Russian Linguistics at Arctic University of Norway. As many other professors, he has frequently found himself in situations where the simple conjugation of a verb like писать ‘write’ (1) triggered many questions from his Russian class. It is in practice impossible “to travel through time/centuries” every time a new exceptional form is introduced or mentioned in the setting of a language class. How Russian Came to Be the Way It Is is designed to make Russian more accessible to students by shedding light on Russian linguistic changes over its history.

Review: Exploring The Us Language Flagship Program: Professional Competence In A Second Language By Graduations; Poetry Reader For Russian Learners, Grant H. Lundberg, Richard Robin

Russian Language Journal

Concepts of the Prague Linguistic Circle on the American Continent and the Theory of Emotive Language,” discusses the structuralist ideas of the PLC in her publications on the semiotics of language and literary analysis. Steven Franks and Catherine Rudin’s contribution, “Invariant -to in Bulgarian,” investigates the connection of invariant -to, found in relative clauses and wh-constructions, to inflectional -to, found in the neuter definite article. They use syntactic theory as well as comparative Macedonian data to examine the issue. Finally, Donald Reindl, “The Fate of German (Post)Velars in Slovenian Loanwords,” tries to impose some order on a seemingly chaotic situation. …

Constructing A Russian Elicited Imitation Exam, Troy Cox, Jennifer Bown, Jacob Burdis

Russian Language Journal

A Russian student wants to know if it is worth the expense to pay for an official ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI). The director of a flagship program wants to measure the improvement of the oral proficiency of students returning from their in-country experience. A university department needs to provide evidence that their students are meeting learning objectives as part of accreditation. In each of these cases, a cost-effective, scalable solution to measuring oral proficiency would be helpful.

On The Expressive Function Of Russian Quantitative Aktionsarten In Speech, Elena Nikolaenko

Russian Language Journal

The goal of this article is to examine the expressive function of Russian quantitative Aktionsarten in oral and written speech from the perspective of functional grammar and cognitive linguistics, the theoretical principles of which are outlined below. The focus will be on occasionally used Aktionsarten, which name an action quantity as “greater than the norm”; the term is used by native Russian speakers to express personal appreciation/depreciation of the action.

Russian Folk Art By Alison Hilton (Review), Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby

Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Teaching Vocabulary In Semantic Groups: A Study In The Russian Language Classroom, Kate White

Russian Language Journal

A long-standing assumption in the field of second language acquisition research is that learning new vocabulary items in semantic groupings has a positive effect on acquisition and retention (Finkbeiner and Nicol 2003). This assumption is common among researchers and instructors of second languages, as it seems to fit intuitively with the most popular current communicative approaches to teaching. However, researchers have begun to question this assumption, as it has not been supported by empirical evidence (Altarriba and Mathis 1997; Finkbeiner and Nicol 2003; Papathanasiou 2009). Previous research is not conclusive on the topic due to differences in methodology and design. …

The Russian Prepositions Перед, Против And Напротив: A Cognitive Linguistic Approach, Marika Kalyuga

Russian Language Journal

There is an assumption in cognitive linguistics that most non-spatial senses of a preposition and a case are derived from a common (usually spatial) sense through metaphoric extensions. The metaphoric extensions involve the understanding of a concept, the so-called “target,” in terms of a more simple, concrete concept called the “source” (Lakoff 1987; Boers 1996; Boers & Demecheleer 1998). For this reason, prepositions and cases with a similar spatial sense frequently develop similar non-spatial senses. For example, the Ancient Greek prepositions πρό ‘before’ and ἀντί ‘opposite’ are associated with nearly the same proto-scenario or idealized mental representation of events linked …

Are Russian Aspectual Prefixes Empty Or Full (And Does It Matter)?, Oscar E. Swan

Russian Language Journal

A review of Laura A. Janda, Anna Endresen, Julia Kuznetsova, Olga Lyashkevskaya, Anastasia Makarova, Tore Nesset, and Svetlana Sokolova. 2013. Why Russian Aspectual Prefixes Aren’t Empty: Prefixes as Verb Classifiers. Bloomington, IN: Slavica. References. xv + 211 pp. Paper.