30.2373, Some Post Fund-drive Words and a Final Rising Star: Meet Anastasia Panova!

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-2373. Thu Jun 06 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.2373, Some Post Fund-drive Words and a Final Rising Star: Meet Anastasia Panova!

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Date: Thu, 06 Jun 2019 23:26:41
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Some Post Fund-drive Words and a Final Rising Star: Meet Anastasia Panova!

 

Dear Readers,

Thank you so much for your contributions this year. It is true that the fund
drive is over but you can always donate by visiting our donation page here and
searching for the the "Linguist List Discretionary Fund."

As a post-fund-drive treat we have one final rising star to present. Meet
Anastasia Panova! She is a 4th year BA student in the Linguistic Convergence
Laboratory at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and has done
substantial work. She is involved in a field project for the documentation of
Abaza, a Northwest Caucasian language, and has published a great journal
article comparing morphologically-bound complementation in several languages
of Eurasia and the Americas. She has also co-authored several talks given at
international conferences. In her lab, she has assisted by compiling a corpus
of Russian as it is spoken in Daghestan, developing a web interface for this
data and also manages online access to the data. These are only a few of the
many technical solutions that she has provided for the lab. On top of all
this, according to her mentors she is also an excellent team worker. With all
of that said... lets get to her piece.

******************************************************************

Anastasia Panova

What all linguistic theories as well as computational technologies face at
some moment is linguistic diversity. A formal theory designed on the basis of
well-described languages may be unable to adequately account for data from
little-known languages whose good descriptions are either lacking or have
appeared only recently. Likewise, NLP tools are hard to imagine working with
all existing languages with equal ease. I am especially sorry for psycho- and
neurolinguistics where all studies are still limited to a very small range of
languages. Even typologists are not able to build databases covering more than
half of all existing languages due to the lack of data, and usually their
samples contain only about 200 languages. I think that if we want to do more
than just investigate the most widespread or best described languages but
rather to understand something about the boundaries of linguistic diversity
(if any) and in the end about Language in general, then the first thing that
we still need to do is high-quality language documentation and description.

Language description is not only extremely important but also really
interesting. Perhaps we can compare linguists to astronomers who also are
still able to study only a small part of the universe, and every new piece of
data appears to be a discovery. A crucial difference is that linguistic
fieldwork is mostly not about technical measurements but about interaction
with living people. What will end up being written in the grammar of the
language one is working on largely depends on one's interaction with the
native speakers and on one's interpretation of the results thereof. That's why
any fieldworker has a great responsibility towards those who will rely on her
data. I admire linguists who spend months and even years in the field and work
on the documentation of the whole language alone, but I also really appreciate
the Russian tradition of collective fieldtrips where students are allowed to
work in the field on a par with professional linguists. For many of our
students, the real interest in linguistics began with fieldwork.

Talking about my current research interests, I must admit that I certainly
cannot name the closed list thereof. At the School of Linguistics of the
Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow, where I am finishing my BA
studies, all BA students at some moment have to choose between two profiles:
theoretical linguistics and computational linguistics. Forced to somehow
define my research interests I have chosen theoretical linguistics, but,
fortunately, I still have a lot of opportunities to learn computational tools
for linguistic analysis and these skills help me a lot in my theoretical
studies.

I also have been lucky to be involved in several scientific projects carried
out at my university. First, I am working with great scholars such as Johanna
Nichols at the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory, where I do corpus
linguistics. We collect recordings of different varieties of the languages of
Russia, compile spoken corpora of these varieties (some corpora are already
available online at https://ilcl.hse.ru/en/corpora/) and then use them to
investigate the processes and mechanisms of language contact. Second, I am a
member of the research team studying Abaza, a polysynthetic language spoken by
approximately 50,000 people in the Russian North Caucasus and in Turkey and
currently the least studied language of the Northwest Caucasian family. We are
indebted to the people in the village Inzhich-Chukun (Abazinsky district,
Karachay-Cherkess Republic, Russia) where our team has been working on the
description of Abaza during last three years thanks to their extraordinary
hospitality and tireless efforts to facilitate our research. Recently, we have
just returned from another field trip to Inzhich-Chukun, where I had been
collecting data for my BA thesis. This thesis is the accumulation of the
results of my fieldwork on the aspectual, modal and evaluative verbal suffixes
of Abaza, whose order in the wordform presumably results from their scopal
relations and compatibility restrictions. In my thesis, I elaborate this
approach on the basis of my analysis of the interaction of the semantics of
these suffixes, many of which are polysemous, with the event structure of
verbs. I hope that my study of Abaza suffixation will contribute both to the
description of this fascinating language and to the deeper understanding of
the workings of polysynthetic morphology in general.

******************************************************************

Thanks so much for all of your support and donations during this year's fund
drive. Have a great summer!







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