Russian Linguistics 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

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

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 …

Modern Russian Reflections On The Soviet-Afghan War, Octavio Camba

University Honors Theses

The work is focused on the translation and analysis of Russian news articles in recent years which reflect on the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979-1989. Various sources offer lessons of the war, and the reflections carry criticisms of the Soviet failures in warfare and governance that created the present situation in Afghanistan, directly and with related consequences. The Soviet Union was a large conventional army that attempted to create political transformation in Afghanistan by supporting the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan in order to stop the perceived threat of radical political Islam, and its spread into the Soviet Central Asian republics …

Computational Representation Of Russian Aspectual Morphology With A Focus On Perfective Prefixation, Natalia Tyulina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work performs an empirical analysis of Russian aspectual morphology focusing on perfective derivation via prefixation. We present a number of computational experiments measuring productivity of morphological processes of prefixation that form perfective verbs from simple imperfective verbs. Several hypotheses related to the argument structure of perfective verbs vs. their prefixed derivatives are tested statistically. Furthermore, we investigate semantic relatedness by computing cosine similarities of unprefixed verbs vs. their prefixed versions. Finally, we analyze the correlation between productivity, frequency, argument structure and semantic similarity across both simple imperfective – prefixed perfective verb forms, and various perfectivizing verbal prefixes.

Detection And Morphological Analysis Of Novel Russian Loanwords, Yulia Spektor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper investigates recent English loanwords in Russian and explores ways in which computational methods can help further theoretical research. The goal of the study is two-fold: to find new, previously unattested loanwords borrowed over the last decade and to examine the rate of adaptation of the new borrowings, attested by the degree to which they conform to the constraints of the Russian language. First, we train a finite-state pipeline that combines character n-gram language models, which encode phonotactic and lexical properties of loanwords, with a binary classifier to detect loanwords. The model achieves state-of-the-art performance results during evaluation, surpassing …

The Current Language Crisis In Siberia, Emma L. Vandehey

University Honors Theses

In the early years of the Soviet Union, state leaders were hesitant to create laws that would establish a national language. The USSR prided itself on multiculturalism and its ability to unify people from a variety of cultural backgrounds. As the Soviet Union became more established, ideations shifted from unity to uniformity. Indigenous languages from all over the country and various states were phased out, and the Russian language was implemented for children starting in primary school. Policies regarding heritage languages in primary and secondary schools stayed in place after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now indigenous peoples living …

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 …

Automatic Keyphrase Extraction From Russian-Language Scholarly Papers In Computational Linguistics, Yves Wienecke

University Honors Theses

The automatic extraction of keyphrases from scholarly papers is a necessary step for many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including text retrieval, machine translation, and text summarization. However, due to the different grammatical and semantic intricacies of languages, this is a highly language-dependent task. Many free and open source implementations of state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction techniques exist, but they are not adapted for processing Russian text. Furthermore, the multi-linguistic character of scholarly papers in the field of Russian computational linguistics and NLP introduces additional complexity to keyphrase extraction. This paper describes a free and open source program as a proof of …

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 …

Old Belief And The Balance Of Red And Blue: How Old Believers Managed Cultural Infringement, Joseph K. Van Den Berg

History

This paper covers the spread of the Old Believers into Western society, studying how they changed and evolved during the Cold War. The paper focuses on two communities, using them to compare the different attitudes Old Believers had towards differing host cultures. Using a litany of newspapers and the work of a few dedicated anthropologists, "Old Belief and the Balance of Red and Blue: How Old Believers Managed Cultural Infringement" shows the vast array of responses to a small group of Russian sectarians establishing themselves within Western Cultures of differing size and values.

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 …

The Agent Across The Border: "Russia" And "Ukraine" As Actors In The News, 2013-2015, Abbey L. Thomas

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This study examines how two media sources—one Russian and one Ukrainian—portray Russia and Ukraine before, during, and after the EuroMaidan crisis in Ukraine. Russian-language texts posted between January 2013 and December 2015 on the sites Ukranews.com (a Ukrainian news outlet) and TASS.ru (Russian) were organized in a corpus of over 20,000,000 words. This study analyzes the nouns “Россия” (“Russia”) and “Украина” (“Ukraine”) according to the verbal predicates that attach to either noun. The results demonstrate predictable variation in the agency of the two entities in response to cultural events and contexts.

The analysis of the corpus data operationalizes a combined …