Publications

The chapter surveys applicative constructions in the languages of the Northwest Caucasian family.

This book is an introduction to historical study of art. Sixteen problematic essays do not follow any chronological or geographical order of styles and schools, they treat of important cultural, political, religious issues, present in the history of art and images of all times and on all continents. They propose several points of view on precise works of art, objects, images, monuments in their precise historical context and background. All essays are illustrated by hundreds of visual documents and artifacts from East to West, from antiquity to our days, by etchings, paintings, sculptures and buildings of great masters — Leonardo, Rubens, Borromini, van Gogh, Rodin, Picasso, Pollock, Gabo, but also of less known or anonymous authors. All this material is analyzed with modern methods of art history and cultural studies. 
The book adresses scholars and students in humanistic disciplines and all readers interested in cultural history.

This book is an introduction to historical study of art. Sixteen problematic essays do not follow any chronological or geographical order of styles and schools, they treat of important cultural, political, religious issues, present in the history of art and images of all times and on all continents. They propose several points of view on precise works of art, objects, images, monuments in their precise historical context and background. All essays are illustrated by hundreds of visual documents and artifacts from East to West, from antiquity to our days, by etchings, paintings, sculptures and buildings of great masters — Leonardo, Rubens, Borromini, van Gogh, Rodin, Picasso, Pollock, Gabo, but also of less known or anonymous authors. All this material is analyzed with modern methods of art history and cultural studies.  The book adresses scholars and students in humanistic disciplines and all readers interested in cultural history.

The paper provides, in a series of anecdotal observations and accounts, an impression of the main political and cultural conditions under which archaeology is being conducted in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan) in the early years of the 21st century. The author uses almost exclusively the experience of his own work in the region since 2009. The observations made over the best part of a dozen years suggest an amalgam of factors influencing the work of archaeologists there, ranging from post-Soviet national and ethnic ideologies voluntarily adopted by some native practitioners, to quite open and complete control and even suppression by the authorities in parts of the region. The status and behaviour of foreign archaeologists is often ambiguous, with a degree of compliance with ‘local conditions’ usually required in order to do any work at all. The attraction of the tremendously rich archaeology of Central Asia, as well as hopes of contributing to changes for the better, often appear to outweigh individual concerns about collaboration with the local powers that be.

P(reposition)-stranding is typologically rare. Nevertheless, many languages exhibit phenomena that look like P-stranding (Campos 1991, Poplack, Zentz, and Dion 2012) or involve P-stranding under common theorizing (see Philippova 2014 and references therein). These studies argue that these are not instances of P-complement movement and provide alternative analyses. This squib addresses Russian prepositions that can be postposed to and apparently stranded by their dependents. They are proposed to be PPs rather than P-heads, with dative dependents adjoined similarly to external possessors. The analysis captures all idiosyncrasies of their nominal dependents and alleviates the need to posit exceptional P-stranding in Russian.

Modern West Aramaic is one of the most critically endangered Aramaic languages, and the only extant member of the Western Aramaic sub-family. Its speakers are among the few who have not migrated away from their original territory, but the Syrian civil war (2011–present) has accelerated its endangerment and resulted in the abandonment of one of the three villages in which it was previously spoken. Modern Western Aramaic thus provides us with an opportunity to document a language precisely as it succumbs to some of the primary causes of language endangerment, i.e. conflict and migration. The following text, collected in 2020, discusses this community’s experience during this conflict from the perspective of one of the few remaining competent speakers. We have contextualized this text with a discussion of the language and its grammar in comparison with the most recent descriptions, all of which were made decades prior to the war, when the language was much less endangered.

To avoid post-neurosurgical language deficits, intraoperative mapping of the language function in the brain can be complemented with preoperative mapping with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The validity of an fMRI “language localizer” paradigm crucially depends on the choice of an optimal language task and baseline condition. This study presents a new fMRI “language localizer” in Russian using overt sentence completion, a task that comprehensively engages the language function by involving both production and comprehension at the word and sentence level. The paradigm was validated in 18 neurologically healthy volunteers who participated in two scanning sessions, for estimating test–retest reliability. For the first time, two baseline conditions for the sentence completion task were compared. At the group level, the paradigm significantly activated both anterior and posterior language-related regions. Individual-level analysis showed that activation was elicited most consistently in the inferior frontal regions, followed by posterior temporal regions and the angular gyrus. Test–retest reliability of activation location, as measured by Dice coefficients, was moderate and thus comparable to previous studies. Test–retest reliability was higher in the frontal than temporo-parietal region and with the most liberal statistical thresholding compared to two more conservative thresholding methods. Lateralization indices were expectedly left-hemispheric, with greater lateralization in the frontal than temporo-parietal region, and showed moderate test-retest reliability. Finally, the pseudoword baseline elicited more extensive and more reliable activation, although the syllable baseline appears more feasible for future clinical use. Overall, the study demonstrated the validity and reliability of the sentence completion task for mapping the language function in the brain. The paradigm needs further validation in a clinical sample of neurosurgical patients. Additionally, the study contributes to general evidence on test–retest reliability of fMRI.

The paper is dedicated to the “Rabbit Head” sign in Maya hieroglyphic writing. It is possible to establish its phonetic reading value pe thanks to two observations – the sign is optionally combined with the syllable ‘e in the  name of La Mar kingdom and bears resemblance to Diego de Landa’s sign for the letter “p”. This syllabic value pe  results in the reading of La Mar as pe[pe]’tuun and identification of two verbal roots: pek- “to summon, call up” and kop- “to roll up, coil”. The former one is used to describe convocation of the subjects before the king and invoke gods. The word ‘u-kope‘m “his rolled-up one” is a term for “bloodletting rope”, also used as part of a metaphorical “father’s child” parentage statement.

Geopolitical interventions since the end of the 1980s—such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, a decline in the activities of state-owned coal companies, and governmental initiatives to increase tourism activities—have affected the community viability of two main settlements on Svalbard: Barentsburg and Longyearbyen. This paper explores how the residents of these settlements (with different cultural backgrounds) perceive the effects of socioeconomic transitions on community viability. The analysis of qualitative interviews with residents of Barentsburg (n = 62) and Longyearbyen (n = 36) reveals the residents’ perceptions of the pace of the transition and the changing community composition. New types of commercial activities, such as tourism, contribute to local value creation and socioeconomic development but come with concerns grounded in community fluctuation, environmental protection, economic prioritisation, and power relationships. Compared to Longyearbyen, Barentsburg has undergone relatively minor demographic and social changes and remains stable in terms of culture, language, and management practices. We conclude that the viability of Longyearbyen and Barentsburg during the transition was affected by community dynamics and fluctuations, social relationships within and between communities, and local institutional practices.

-

Merab Mamardashvili repeatedly mentions Ludwig Wittgenstein in his writings.  But even when Mamardashvili does not refer to Wittgenstein directly, there is a recognizable echo of Wittgenstein in the thinking of the Russian philosopher. This article follows the closeness of their philosophical approaches to determine in what sense the school of transcendentalism is relevant to both philosophers, and to see  how Mamardashvili displays his Wittgensteinian critique of the idea that consciousness is "put forward" to the world. Wittgenstein argued that the subject does not belong to the world, but to the boundary that forms this world. The similar idea we find in Mamardashvili. The latter writes that when we "speak of consciousness and not of anything else, we are speaking of such things for which it is impossible to show (substitute) their empirical and, by a finite number of operations, controllable equivalents. In turn, Wittgenstein compares consciousness to an eye that cannot see itself in its field of vision. Mamardashvili calls the same phenomenon "minimum-transcensus" and states that "it is impossible to pass continuously from empirical facts explained by theoretical concepts to those concepts by which they are explained, that is, to deduce them in a purely logical way. "Minimum-transcensus" belongs to the boundary of experience, so it cannot be found within experience itself, "put forward" within that which constitutes the objectivity and objective manifestation of our experience.

Although the history of Russian-Iranian relations remains seriously understudied, few would refute the oppressive imperialist role played by Imperial Russia in Iran during the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century. However, practically nothing has been written about the conceptual shifts which began to take place in Russia’s Persian policy immediately after the February Revolution of 1917. Little is known about the large-scale projects, through which Russia was to bring “its own democracy” to Iranian Azerbaijan and its other northern provinces, with further proliferation all over Iran. This was meant to facilitate Russia’s political and trade expansion down to the Persian Gulf, which had been the eventual goal for many decades. Drawing on unpublished documents from Russian, British and French archives, this paper studies the relevant correspondence between the Russian, British and French missions in Tehran and their central authorities, including the short-lived governments of Republican Russia, during the decade 1909-1919. In doing so, it analyses the local agency of the Russian diplomats in Iran, such as Vladimir Minorsky (1877-1966), in the emergence of these projects, and investigates the manifestation of symbolic capital and the productive interaction of power/knowledge relations.

Ample evidence suggests that monolingual adults can successfully generate lexical and morphosyntactic predictions in reading and that correct predictions facilitate sentence comprehension. In this eye-tracking corpus reading study, we investigate whether the same is true for reading in heritage language. Specifically, we ask whether heritage speakers (HSs) of Russian are able to anticipate lexical and/or morphosyntactic information of the upcoming words in the sentence and whether they differ in the predictions from monolingual children and L2 learners. We are also interested in whether the literacy level (i.e., Russian literacy experience or reading fluency in English) influences lexical and morphosyntactic prediction. Our results indicate that HSs as well as other groups were able to anticipate the specific lexical item, and the ability was contingent on the Russian literacy experience and reading fluency in dominant English as evident in some of the early and late eye-tracking measures. Similar to children and L2 learners, the word class and the verb number predictability affected reading times in HSs, but HSs were the only group to anticipate the number of the upcoming noun. We discuss findings in respect to the utility account of the bilingual prediction and divergent attainment trajectory of the heritage language development.

In this paper, we address the issue of reliability of quantitative data on multilingualism of the past obtained as recall data. More specifically, we investigate whether the interviewees’ assessments of the language repertoires of their late relatives (indirect data) provide results that are quantitatively similar to those obtained from the people of the same age range themselves (direct data). The empirical data we use come from an ongoing field study of traditional multilingualism in Daghestan (Russia). We trained machine learning models to see whether they can detect differences in indirect and direct data. We conclude that our indirect quantitative data on L2 other than Russian are essentially similar to direct, while there may be a small but systematic underestimation when reporting other’s knowledge of Russian.

This article publishes and analyses

Certain Observaunt Touching the City and

the Empire of Muscovia

(ca. 1634), a previously unknown anonymous English

description of Russia, and two letters from the National Archives, London,

related to it. The

Observaunt

includes eight paragraphs dedicated to printing

and education in Russia, the activities of Greek monks in Moscow, the country’s

geography, the organisation of the Ambassadorial Chancery, foreigners’ re-

baptising into the Orthodox faith, and Europeans’ trade and church activities.

The anonymous author of the text appears to have been an intellectual concerned

with the preservation and dissemination of bookish learning and a critic of the low

morals of the inhabitants of the city’s foreign quarters. Along with the

Observaunt

,

two letters are held in the same archival file. These were sent by a George Reade,

an Englishman, to his brother Robert from Moscow in June 1634. Reade informs

his correspondent about his life in Moscow and his unsuccessful attempts to

import pearls into Russia: he briefly mentions the Smolensk War, which ended

in 1634, and a great fire in Moscow the same year. Using the findings of Russian

and international scholars, the article identifies most of the foreigners mentioned

by Reade, both Englishmen and Germans. Based on Reade’s letters and studies

of British and American historians, the author reconstructs Reade’s biography. In

conclusion, the article discusses the hypothesis about Reade’s authorship of the

Observaunt

. The article contains the original English text of the

Observaunt

and

Reade’s letters with a Russian translation

Online customer reviews, being an essential factor that determines success or failure in business, namely, in the tourism industry, demand close attention since the investigation of this type of discourse might bear some implications both for language specialists and for hotel managers. This paper is a quantitative and qualitative study of evaluation devices occurring in the corpus of hotel reviews from Booking.com.  The analysis is based on the methods associated with corpus linguistics and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday 1994; Eggins 2004), specifically, the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005) which is applied to a new type of discourse, the discourse of hotel ratings. The study focuses on the categories of Attitude, Graduation and Engagement suggested by Martin and White and investigates inscribed and invoked evaluation. In order to adapt the Attitude dimensions to the corpus under study, new subcategories were created, contributing to theorising evaluation. The practical result of the study is a list of evaluation devices employed in hotel reviews which might be useful for further corpus analyses and for designing systems for automated analysis of customer evaluation. Since online customer reviews are commonly used by hotels as a benchmark of their guests’ satisfaction and a valuable information source of features and services that need to be improved, this study is also likely make an important contribution to the industry.

This paper offers a reconstruction of Xenocrates’ theory of indivisibles which would not commit him to the idea of ‘jerky motion’ ridiculed by Aristotle in Physica VI, yet would perfectly square with Plato’s Timaeus, the basis of Xenocrates’ canon. Relying on Alexander’s, Porphyry’s, and Themistius’s accounts of his theory, as well on detailed analysis of De lineis insecabilibus, I suggest that Xenocrates’ minima, contrary to what Aristotle implies, are not to be understood as more or less stable particulars, like tiny chunks of matter, moving about or leaping in physical space from point A to point B. Yet Xenocrates’ minima do remain ‘physical’ and ‘corporeal’ in a more Platonic sense of these words, not presupposing any kind of leaping, jumping, or jerking. This explains why Xenocrates associated the sensible realm with one of the three Fates, namely Clotho.

The Greek colony of Chersonesos was founded in the 5th century BC on the coast of the Crimean Peninsula in the northern Black Sea region. Extensive archeological research has investigated the timing and mode of the Greek land seizure and the responses of the local Taurian tribes, focusing on a large necropolis dating to the earliest period of the colony, somewhere between the 5th and the 4th century BC. Relying on burial traditions as an indicator of the biogeographic origin of the deceased, it was hypothesized that individuals buried in flexed positions were Taurian whereas individuals buried in extended positions were Greek. Here, we test the hypothesis that individuals in flexed and extended burial positions are biologically different by directly analyzing the human skeletal remains. For this, we collected three different types of phenotypic data commonly used for biodistance analysis, namely, (1) cranial measurements, (2) dental measurements, and (3) dental nonmetric traits, recorded for 47 individuals. Using Gower distance coefficients, we combine the three data types in a single analysis and estimate biological relationships among a subset of well-preserved individuals with documented flexed (n = 8) and extended (n = 13) burial position. The estimated distances show a large amount of overlap between the two groups, with the exception of two individuals that are more divergent. To statistically corroborate this finding, we use distance-based permutational multivariate analyses of variance (PERMANOVA) and dispersion (PERMDISP). Both analyses reveal no statistically significant differences between the groups, neither in group centroids nor in group dispersions. Our results therefore contradict the idea that burial position was determined by ancestry of the deceased. This has implications for future archeological research at Chersonesos and other Greek colonies of the northern Black Sea region.

This paper tests the effectiveness of Burrow’s Delta Method on a corpus of selected prose writings in ancient Greek. When tested on a corpus of fourteen and eight authors, the method yields good results with relatively small samples (1000, 3000, and 5000 words) and different word frequency vectors (100, 200, 500 words), but its performance is worse with texts of similar genres (oratory, historical or medical writings). We conclude that it is the generic proximity that influences the results of classification most. However, in cases where confusion is more likely, such as the writings of Demosthenes and Aeschines, the method proves effective for shortlisting potential authors. Shortlists can give an adequate idea of a sample’s nearest neighbors while leaving some freedom for the researcher in interpreting the results.