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

  Knyazev M.

  Experimental evidence suggests that null complement anaphora in Russian is not reducible to clausal ellipsis

  Null complement anaphora, NCA (e.g., I suggested the price was too high, and she agreed ∅.), is a long known but poorly understood phenomenon subject to idiosyncratic lexical restrictions. In languages like Russian, however, it is (or
  appears) productive, with verbs not allowing NCA hard to nd, raising the question whether omission of the clausal argument (CP) in NCA contexts can be derived by a supposedly regular process of CP/clausal argument ellipsis, which has recently gained attention in the literature, and which independently exists in Russian. This paper tests the prediction of this view whereby selection for CP should be sufficient (and necessary) for NCA-licensing, using two acceptability rating studies based on a corpus-based list of potential NCA-licensors. The results suggest that whether a verb
  licenses omission of the CP in NCA contexts is not predictable from its ability to license CP, and that the process is lexically sensitive. This provides evidence against analyzing NCA contexts as a result of CP ellipsis and more generally against reducing NCA to the latter in Russian and similar languages. The paper highlights issues of cross-linguistic variation in the study of NCA. It also raises questions about the parallelism condition on clausal ellipsis.

  
  
  

  Folia Linguistica. 2025.

• Book chapter

  Беркович М. А., Rudnev P.

  Anaphoric potential of Russian ‘small nominals’ in obligatory-control environment

  In bk.: Экспериментальные исследования языка: материалы конференции 2025. M.: 2025. P. 20-22.

• 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