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Research interests

  • Russian linguistics:
    • synchronic and diachronic morphosyntax
    • dialectal and historical phonology 
    • language contact in Siberia and Far East
  • South Slavic linguistics:
    • inflectional morphology 
    • dialect variation
    • historical change
  • Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for linguistic analysis

Current research 

Selected research projects

  • 2021 - 2024. Declining case: Inflectional Loss in Progress (with Dr Matthew Baerman and Professor Greville. G. Corbett).  Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey. Funded by the Leverhulme Trust. 
  • 2021. Patterns of phonetic variation in North Russian vowel systems. Research fellowship  by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich).
  • 2019. Investigating dialectal variation and historical change in Russian using EMU speech data management system. Research fellowship  by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich).
  • 2018. Vowel reduction and neutralization in Russian: dialectal variation and historical change.  Research fellowship  by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich).
  • 2016 - 2017; 2018-2019. An interactive online learning environment for students of Russian (University of Oxford Humanities Teaching Award grant, 2016 - 2017; 2018-2019). Principal Investigator. 
  • 2014–2016: The language of Russian Old Believers (funded by the Russian Foundation for Humanities), Russian Language Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences. Co-Investigator
  • 2012–2013:  Regional variants of the Russian language from a synchronic and diachronic perspective (funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation). Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Principal Investigator. 
  • 2009–2013:  Russian regional corpus: acoustic database with discourse annotation (funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), University of Surrey & Ruhr University Bochum. Available online at www.rureg.de. Research Fellow.
  • 2012: Sound change across generations (short-term research fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation), Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany       
  • 2009: Sound change in progress: Case of a North Russian dialect (short-term research fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation), Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
  • 2004–2008 Short-term morphosyntactic change (AHRC, evaluated as ‘outstanding’), Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey: www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/stmc/ 
  • 2003–2004 Russian in Siberia: Acoustic Database and Contact Phenomena (postdoctoral research fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation), Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. 

PhD supervision

2011– 2015: Tatiana Korobeinikova, The evolution of the vowel system in a Kirov dialect. Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow

Selected research outcomes

Lingustic databases

Forthcoming. Declining Case: Inflectional Loss in Progress (with M. Baerman, G. G. Corbett, M. Kyuseva)
Work in progress

2016. Russian Regional Corpus (with Ch. Sappok, L. Paschen, K. Brabender, A. Koch, N. Kühl) 
https://rureg.dch.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de 

2009. Short Term Morphosyntactic Change Databases  (with D. Brown, G. G. Corbett, M. Baerman, A. Long & H. Quilliam)
https://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/stmc  

Teaching online resourses

Forthcoming. An interactive online learning environment for students of Russian.  Level B2-C1. 
To be published online by October 2024.

Articles and book chapters

Forthcoming (with M. Kyuseva, M. Baerman & G. G. Corbett). Diachronic paths to uninflectedness in South Slavic. To appear in Enrique
Palancar & Sebastian Fedden (eds.). Uninflectedness. Berlin: Language Science Press. Leading author

Forthcoming (with M. Kyuseva, M. Baerman & G. G. Corbett). Semantic factors in case loss. In Kennard, H., E. Lindsay-Smith, A. Lahiri & M. Maiden (eds.). Historical Linguistics 2022. Selected papers from the 25th ICHL, Oxford, 1-5 August 2022. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

2021. О редукции гласных по данным ДАРЯ [On vowel reduction according to the data from the Dialectological Atlas of the Russian Language]. Sub specie aeternitatis. Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences. 48-56.

2020. The impact of consonantal context on vowel reduction: A case study. In: Anderson, Cormac and Natalia Kuznetsova (eds.). The dynamics of vowel reduction and loss: phonetic mechanisms and outcomes for phonology and morphology. Special issue of Italian Journal of Linguistics, vol. 32, issue 1. 45-64.

2019. Case Loss in Pronominal Systems: Evidence from Bulgarian. In: Baerman, Matthew, Oliver Bond and Andrew Hippisley (eds.).  Perspectives on Morphology. Papers in Honour of Greville G. Corbett. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

2014. Articulatory shift and the rise of neutralization of vowels.  Problemy fonetiki VI. "Nauka", Moscow. (In Russian with English translation).

2011 (with Dunstan Brown, Matthew Baerman, Greville G. Corbett). Changing semantic factors in case selection: Russian evidence from the last two centuries. Morphology. Vol. 21, Issue 3. 573-592. Leading author

2010 (with Matthew Baerman, Dunstan Brown, Greville G. Corbett, Peter Williams). Predicate agreement in Russian: A corpus-base approach. Wiener Slawistischer Almanach. Sonderband 74. pp.109-121. Leading author

2009. (with Dunstan Brown, Carole Tiberius, Marina Chumakina and Greville G. Corbett). Databases designed for investigating specific phenomena. In: Martin Evereart and Simon Musgrave (eds.) Linguistic Databases. Berlin – New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 

2008. (with Alison Long, Dunstan Brown, Matthew Baerman, Greville G. Corbett). Predicate nouns in Russian. Russian Linguistics 32, 2008. 99-113. Leading author

2006. Russian in Kamchatka: prominent features in the view of linguists and speakers. In: Dieter Stern & Christian Voss (eds.), Marginal Linguistic Identities. Studies in Slavic contact and borderland varieties, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Publishers. Eurolinguistische Arbeiten, vol. 2.

2004. On sentence prominence in the speech of Russian Old Settlers in East Siberia and Kamchatka. In: Studies in Language Interference (European Russian, Siberia, Far East). Bulletin des phonetischen Fonds, No 9.  Bochum. 79-86.

Books

2004. (with Christian Sappok). Russkoye Ust´e. Bulletin des phonetischen Fonds der russischen Sprache. Supplementband 14. Bochum. 104 pp. (In Russian)

2004 (edited volume). Studies in Language Interference (European Russia, Siberia, Far East). Book and audio CD.  Bulletin des phonetischen Fonds der russischen Sprache, No 9.  Bochum. (In Russian)

1999. (with L.L. Kasatkin, R.F. Kasatkina, D.M. Savinov, E.V. Shigel). Russian Dialects. South Russian variety. Moscow. Nauka. 207pp. (In Russian)

Selected presentations / invited talks

2023 (with M. Kyuseva, M. Baerman, G. G. Corbett). Diachronic paths to uninflectedness in South Slavonic. 45th DGfS Annual Meeting, Cologne, 10 March 2023.  

2022 (with M. Kyuseva, M. Baerman, G. G. Corbett).  Semantic factors in case loss: the Serbian - Bulgarian dialectal continuum. 25 International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Oxford, 4 August 2022.

2022 (with M. Kyuseva, M. Baerman, G. G. Corbett ). Word order and case marking in Bulgarian dialects.  57th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. Bucharest, 25 August 2022.

2021 (with M. Baerman, G. G. Corbett). GIS analysis of the vartiation in the pronominal case marking (dialects of West Bulgaria). Current methods in syncronic and diachronic study of the Serbian language. Moscow, 18 May 2021. (In Russsian)

2019. The use of the Geographic Information System for the research into language variation. Invited talk for the Research Council of the Russian Language  Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Moscow, 24 December 2019.

2019. The decline of the North Russian okan’e: an acoustic analysis. The  International Congress of Researchers in the Russian Language. Moscow State University, Moscow, 20-23 March. 

2017. Vowel shift and the rise of neutralization in North Russian. The 50th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. Zurich, 10-13 September. 

2017. Case marking on personal pronouns in Bulgarian. The Morphological Eye: Surrey Morphology Group 25th Anniversary Workshop, University of Surrey,  08 Sep – 09 September.

2014. Patterns of historical change in vowel systems of Russian regional varieties. Invited talk for the Research Council of the Russian Language  Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Moscow, 10 April 2014.

2014. A series of lectures at the research seminar Current Issues in Teaching Russian Language and Literature to Speakers of Other Languages: the Experience of European Universities. Tomsk State University. 30 March - 5 April.

  1. The database of short term morphosyntactic change (with M. Baerman, D. Brown, G.G. Corbett & A. Long).
  2. Russian regional corpus: insights into regional variation, language history and typology.
  3. Models of sound change.
  4. Processing audio data for phonetic research and corpora using Praat

2013. Russian regional corpus: insights into regional variation, language history and typology. Seminar für Slavistik, Ruhr University Bochum. 13 June 2013.

2013. The evolution of vowel reduction patterns: observation in apparent time. Annual conference of the Linguistic Association of Great Britain, SOAS, London, 29 August 2013

2012. Sound change across generations: the rise of vowel neutralization in the North Russian variety. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, 29 August 2012.

2011. Developing a diachronic model using synchronic data. Invited talk for the Research Council of the Russian Language  Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Moscow, 23 September 2011.

2010. Phonological shift in progress. Old World Conference in Phonology 7. Nice, 28-30 January

2010.  The rise if neutralization in a North Russian dialect. Annual conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. Cambridge, 27-29 March 2010.