Publications

The paper deals with St. Basil's distinction between κήρυγμα (kerygma) and δόγμα (dogma), which has been the subject of much discussion over the last sixty years (Spir. XXVII.66-67).

Hans Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age makes a powerful case for the autonomy of modernity with regard to the preceding Christian epoch – but it also emphasizes at least one continuity between the two, which can be framed via what Blumenberg casts as their common enemy: Gnosticism. Far from being external or secondary, this opposition to Gnosticism structurally defines both of these epochs as their task. What is, however, at stake in this common task? Reading with and against Blumenberg – and following his own account of the epochal shift to modernity – we will shed light, first, on the genealogy and, secondly, the political theology of Blumenbergian modernity, its structure of sovereignty, and key related concepts, such as the world, position, possibility, legitimation, theodicy, immanence, and self-assertion.

The article is focused on the analysis of historiography of epidemics in the history of the European overseas empires. Anti-epidemic campaigns are viewed as an integral part of the medical administration of imperial territories. Changing perceptions of historians regarding the aims, content and consequences of the anti-epidemic campaigns in the colonies form the main concern of the article. 

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 a 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 suggest a method to compile the gold standard datasets for the Russian poetry. Secondly, we focus on the taggers’ performance in the identification of the part of speech tags and lemmas. We reveal what kind of POS classes, paradigm classes and syntactic patterns mostly affect the quality of processing.

This article is an analysis of metadata from 955 closed trials of Soviet people accused of being collaborators during World War II. The trials reveal Soviet officials' understandings of who was capable of collaboration and what kinds of acts were collaboration. At the same time, the aggregate data from trials demonstrates that the accusations were grounded in the realities of the war and were not falsifications like the investigations of the Great Terror in the 1930s.

This paper discusses novel facts regarding adpositional agreement in Avar in light of recent theories of feature valuation. I show that the traditional notion of downward Agree/upward valuation is sufficient to account for the observed facts, rendering the competing mechanism of upward Agree/downward valuation superfluous. 

This is my review of the 'Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and the School of London' exhibtion at the Pushkin Museum

In 1944-46, five million Soviet citizens returned from displacement to the USSR. They had been forced labourers, refugees from conflict, and prisoners of war in occupied Europe. As they returned, all faced official scrutiny and some were arrested, but the majority of Soviet repatriates went home and not to the Gulag. Repatriation was not an episode of mass repression perpetrated by an all-powerful state. Instead, recently declassified archival collections demonstrate that Soviet administrators and police could hardly keep track of returnees. In the absence of strong state control, the crucible of return was in the relationships between repatriates and soldiers, local bosses, and neighbours. The chaos at the end of the war combined with the popular assertion that repatriates were guilty of collaboration with German occupiers made them attractive targets for abuse. Aspects of this story depended on specifically Stalinist practices, yet repatriation was not uniquely Stalinist insofar as it generated problems found in other incidents of mass displacement, particularly in the aftermath of the Second World War. Rather than exclusively a creation of the Soviet system, the often harrowing experience of return was largely a by-product of war.

The following conjecture is proposed: 'New Apuleius' 3.20 Stover (p. 100) qui negantis Stover (quis negantis cod.): qui suae gentis Shumilin.

The paper examines the properties of heavy as a perceptual concept, based on evidence from 11 languages. We demonstrate that the semantics of this concept is heterogeneous; lexemes of this field can be used in situations of at least three types: Lifting, Shifting and Weighing. These situations are either lexicalised as separate words or they converge in a single lexeme in various combinations following certain strategies. We also argue that different metaphorical extensions correspond to different situation types; this allows us to use analysis of metaphoric shifts as an additional instrument to establish the semantic structure of direct meanings.

The paper discusses the standardization efforts to create a morphological standard for the Middle Russian corpus, which is part of the historical collection of the Russian National Corpus (RNC). To meet the needs of different categories of corpus researchers as well as NLP developers, we consider two styles of the morphological annotation (RNC schema and Universal Dependencies schema). A number of specifications of the feature list proposed to facilitate data reusability, linking and conversion.

Two years ago, the International Laboratory for the study of Russian and European intellectual dialogue was established in the National Research University “The Higher School of Economics” by professor Vladimir Kantor on the Russian side and by the German professor Leonid Luks on the Western European side. In the two years of its work the Laboratory has organized six international conferences. The first three events were held under the auspices of the commemorative project “Russia one hundred years after the revolution of 1917,” which analyzed and discussed not only the spiritual, cultural and social-political causes of the emergence of the revolutionary situation in Russia, but also its historical and civilizational consequences for the fate of Russia, Europe and the world. A review of these conferences was published in the first issue of the journal Zeitschrift für Slawistik in 2018.

The paper reports a method to create a speaker’s prosodic fingerprint based on the global characteristics of the pitch movement. Prosodic fingerprint is the distribution of f0 in the low, middle, and high ranges and the distribution of pitch movements from one range into other [Šimko et al. 2017]. This fully automated method can be used to classify the records and to provide the reference level for more sophisticated analysis of the pitch movement and intonation strategies. We evaluate the method by applying it to the spontaneous Russian spoken data recorded in different regions. We model the correlation between the fingerprint and sociolinguistic features such as age, gender, and region. The results of this analysis allow to formulate several sociolinguistic hypotheses that can further be tested with a more detailed analytic technique.

The impact of second language (L2) on first language (L1), known as L2 transfer, has been suggested as a fundamental driving force of L1 attrition. The goal of this study was to test the differential attrition of verb aspect and tense in L1 (Russian) under the influence of L2 (German) grammatical properties. We also investigated whether the age of bilingualism onset and the amount of exposure to L1 modulate this L2 transfer effect.

We tested sentence processing in 30 adult Russian monolingual participants and 30 L1 attritors – Russian-German bilingual speakers – with early versus late bilingualism onset and with low versus high amounts of exposure to L1. Participants heard grammatically correct sentences, sentences with aspect violations and sentences with tense violations, and were asked to detect errors. The accuracy of participants’ responses was analysed using generalized linear mixed-effects modelling in R.

The L2 transfer effect was found, but was strongly modulated by the amount of L1 exposure: only bilinguals with little exposure to L1 showed greater attrition of L1 aspect compared to L1 tense. Moreover, the age of bilingualism onset proved to be more critical than the L2 transfer effect: an earlier bilingualism onset resulted in greater attrition of both aspect and tense in L1. The study provided new evidence about the differential impact of the grammatical similarity between L1 and L2, the age of bilingualism onset and the amount of L1 exposure on aspect and tense processing in L1 attritors.

Our findings suggest that greater L1 use after immigration helps bilingual speakers to be less susceptible to L2 transfer and prevents attrition of L1-specific grammatical categories. Also, a general decline in processing verbal morphology is more likely to occur in speakers with an early rather than a late onset of bilingualism.

Questionnaires constitute a crucial tool in linguistic typology and language description. By nature, a Questionnaire is both an instrument and a result of typological work: its purpose is to help the study of a particular phenomenon cross-linguistically or in a particular language, but the creation of a Questionnaire is in its turn based on the analysis of cross-linguistic data.

We attempt to alleviate linguist’s work by constructing lexical Questionnaires automatically prior to any manual analysis. A convenient Questionnaire format for revealing fine-grained semantic distinctions includes pairings of words with diagnostic contexts that trigger different lexicalizations across languages. Our method to construct this type of a Questionnaire relies on distributional vector representations of words and phrases which serve as input to a clustering algorithm. As an output, our system produces a compact prototype Questionnaire for cross-linguistic exploration of contextual equivalents of lexical items, with groups of three homogeneous contexts illustrating each usage. We provide examples of automatically generated Questionnaires based on 100 frequent adjectives of Russian, including veselyj ‘funny’, ploxoj ‘bad’, dobryj ‘kind’, bystryj ‘quick’, ogromnyj ‘huge’, krasnyj ‘red’, byvšij ‘former’ etc. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the Questionnaires confirms the viability of our method.

Academic bibliography of Syriac and Christian Arabic Studies in Russian.

The paper discusses a history of funeral infrastructure’ development in Russia from the end of nineteenth century to nowadays. Following Tony Walter’s approach to the diversity of the corpse’ management systems, authors state that Russian case does not fit any of the models suggested by Walter. Authors trace changes in Russian funeral management over past century to show that the peculiarity of contemporary funeral culture has its roots in Soviet ideology and command economy with a specific frame of infrastructure (dys)functionality. Paper is based both on archival materials on Soviet funeral management and ethnographic study, conducted in eight regions of Russia from 2016 to 2018.

This paper surveys relative clause constructions in West Circassian (Adyghe) and Kabardian.