Faculty of Humanities

Publications

• Book

  Pritula A.

  ʿAḇdīšōʿ of Gazarta: Patriarch, Poet and Scribe: East Syriac Poetry and Manuscript Culture of the Ottoman Period

  ʿAḇdīšōʿ of Gazarta: Patriarch, Poet and Scribe focuses on the literary legacy of the prominent East Syrian poet and churchman who lived in the 16th century. The role of ʿAḇdīšōʿ of Gazarta for East Syriac ecclesiastical poetry is significant. He was the second patriarch of the Chaldean Church and the founder of its literary tradition.
  
  This book also explores for the first time the manuscript autographs of ʿAḇdīšōʿ of Gazarta, previously unavailable to scholars. In addition, many of this author’s poetic texts are critically published and translated for the first time.

  
  
  

  Vol. 39. Leiden: Brill, 2025.

• Article

  Apresyan V., Orlov A., Koncha K. et al.

  Metaphor in the Mental Lexicon: Investigating Different Types of Polysemy via Eye-Tracking and Behavioral Experiments

  This study investigates the mental representation and processing of the two types of metaphorical senses in Russian polysemous verbs and adjectives using eye-tracking, sensicality judgment, and semantic clustering tasks. The metaphorical senses under study differ in their semantic proximity to the literal sense, with “proximal” metaphors (e.g. “raise prices”) retaining more semantic components, and “distal” metaphors being semantically bleached (e.g. “raise alarm”). Metaphors differed in their mental representations and processing patterns based on semantic proximity and part of speech. In semantic clustering, proximal metaphors were miscategorized with literal senses more often than distal metaphors. Proximal metaphors in adjectives were more often miscategorized with literal senses, while in verbs they were miscategorized with distal metaphors. In sensicality judgment, verbs showed longer reaction times for proximal metaphors, while adjectives demonstrated higher accuracy for distal metaphors compared to literal senses. In eye-tracking, adjectival distal metaphors triggered more regressions on disambiguating nouns than literal senses. Our findings suggest that distal metaphors are stored and processed as distinct, non-compositional units, while proximal metaphors overlap with literal senses and are processed compositionally. Proximal metaphors in adjectives are closer to literal senses, while in verbs they are closer to distal metaphors, explained by different semantic derivation mechanisms.

  Metaphor and Symbol. 2026. Vol. 41. No. 1. P. 5-38.

• Book chapter

  Minov S.

  A Family Drama in Jericho: The Syriac Story of Ḥananya and Shmuni

  In bk.: ‘Brouria Has Spoken Wisely’: Studies in Christian Late Antiquity and Syriac Literature in Honor of Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony. Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2025. P. 211-230.

• Working paper

  Orekhov B.

  You shall know a piece by the company it keeps. Chess plays as a data for word2vec models

  In this paper, I apply linguistic methods of analysis to non-linguistic data, chess plays, metaphorically equating one with the other and seeking analogies. Chess game notations are also a kind of text, and one can consider the records of moves or positions of pieces as words and statements in a certain language. In this article I show how word embeddings (word2vec) can work on chess game texts instead of natural language texts. I don't see how this representation of chess data can be used productively. It's unlikely that these vector models will help engines or people choose the best move. But in a purely academic sense, it's clear that such methods of information representation capture something important about the very nature of the game, which doesn't necessarily lead to a win.

  arxiv.org. Computer Science. Cornell University, 2024