Slavic Linguistics Workshop on Grammar, Cognition, and Society

Laura A. Janda and Dominika Kováříková

Talking about Emotions in Czech

We explore the domain of affect through the lens of “grammatical profiles” – the frequency distributions of inflected forms in corpus data. The GramatiKat resource (https://korpus.cz/gramatikat/Externer Link, Kováříková & Kovářík 2023, Kováříková 2021) facilitates the extraction of the grammatical profiles of 65 nouns that express emotion in Czech. These grammatical profiles serve as input for correspondence analysis, which plots nouns according to attractions/repulsions with respect to grammatical case. This plot, based on how Czechs talk about emotions, is quite different from the plot of emotion terms based on feelings arrived at in studies of psychology. The psychological map is based on positive vs. negative valence and intensity. In the grammatical landscape, the cases cast emotions in various metaphorical roles, for example as objects (accusative, instrumental), substances (genitive), locations (locative, dative), and creatures over which human beings have greater or lesser control (nominative, accusative).

References:
Kováříková, D., Kovářík, O. 2023. GramatiKat (version 2). Nástroj pro výzkum gramatických kategorií a gramatických profilů. FF UK. Praha. http://www.korpus.cz/gramatikatExterner Link.
Kováříková, D. 2021. Sharing data through specialized corpus-based tools: the case of GramatiKat. Jazykovedný časopis 72(2).

Tore Nesset

Foreign Agents – A Linguistic Perspective

Ever since the Russian foreign agent law was enacted in 2012, inostrannyj agent ‘foreign agent’ has become an important concept in Russian political discourse. At the same time, the concept enables us to test linguistic hypotheses regarding the formation of so-called stub compounds (Nesset et al. 2024) and aspectual clusters (Janda 2007). In this talk, which reports on ongoing research in collaboration with Anastasia Makarova (Uppsala University, Sweden), I explore the history of the loanword agent in Russian, the formation of the stub compound in(o)agent and the emergence of the verb in(o)agentit’ based on the stub compound.

References:
Janda, Laura A. 2007. Aspectual clusters of Russian verbs. Studies in Language 31(3), 607–648. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.31.3.04janExterner Link
Nesset, Tore, Martina Björklund & Svetlana Sokolova. 2024. Shortening mechanisms in construction morphology: the Russian spec-N construction. Morphology 34, 501–525. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-024-09431-0Externer Link

Ilia Uchitel

We analyze the impact of korenizatsiia—an early Soviet policy promoting, among other, the shift to the Ukrainian language—on multilingual practices in Ukraine by examining multilingual newspapers published in 1924–1925, when the press underwent a decisive transition from Russian to Ukrainian. Before 1926, many periodicals published articles in both languages, with proportions varying by region, audience (rural vs. urban), and topic. This study focuses on letters from worker correspondents—local activists writing in Russian and Ukrainian. As their locations and workplaces are indicated, these contributions allow us to identify factors influencing the primary language of written communication in specific localities. As a case study, we analyze 314 issues of Krasnoye Znamya, published in the Chernihiv region in 1924–1925, during the shift from bilingual publication to a fully Ukrainian-language format. We automatically extracted more than 6,000 contributions, recording authors’ names, language choice, place of publication, and, where available, occupation (factory, farm, etc.). For each of the five districts of the Chernihiv region, we calculated the proportion of Ukrainian-language contributions. Only in districts with more than 2 thirds of Ukrainian-speaking residents according to the 1926 census, did the share of Ukrainian contributions exceed 15%. The contributor’s economic profile also proved significant: articles sent from factories were written almost exclusively in Russian. We identified only a small number of contributors who switched from Ukrainian to Russian during the period analyzed. No cases of authors consistently writing in both languages were observed. These findings align with contemporary 1920s research on the initial obstacles to Ukrainization, including bibliographic analyses comparing demand for Russian- and Ukrainian-language publications in libraries.

Olia Blacher

Fewer Words, Broader Categories: Animal Naming in Heritage Russian

This talk examines the category Russian zhivotnye ‘animals’ among Russian heritage speakers in Germany, based on a semantic verbal fluency task from the RuGGe projectExterner Link. The results show that children produced fewer animal names than adults, but distributed them more broadly across animal subcategories. This suggests that heritage-language change involves not only reduced lexical access, but also a reorganisation of category structure under sustained contact with German Tiere.

References:
Polinsky, M. 2018. Heritage Languages and Their Speakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rosch, E. 1978. Principles of categorization. In E. Rosch and B. B. Lloyd (eds.), Cognition and Categorization, 27–48. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Rosch, E. and Mervis, C. B. 1975. Family resemblances: Studies in the internal structure of categories. Cognitive Psychology 7(4), 573–605.
Wierzbicka, A. 1997. Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words. New York: Oxford University Press.

Alexandra Miaskowska

Naming Lands & Naming Peoples: Toponymy, Ethnonymy,and the Ideological Construction of Identity
in Polish–Ukrainian Interwar Galicia as Reflected in the Press

Abstract forthcoming.

Katrin Bente Karl

Tense–Aspect Variation in Oral Narratives: How different is Polish?

Building on a corpus-based comparative study of tense and aspect in Russian and Polish oral narratives (Karl, 2026), I develop three directions for future research. The earlier study demonstrated a robust effect of narrative task type on tense–aspect distribution in both languages and identified systematic cross-linguistic differences, most notably a consistently higher proportion of present tense forms in Polish, partly attributable to typological asymmetries such as the Russian null copula. Taking these findings as a starting point, I ask how far the patterns identified can be extended and refined.

First, extending the range of narrative contexts to include film retellings, a task type shown to favour present tense forms even in past-oriented languages, would allow for a more complete picture of task-driven tense–aspect variation. Second, bilingual speakers of Russian and Polish present a natural testing ground for examining whether the asymmetries identified are amplified, neutralised, or restructured under conditions of language contact. Preliminary data from bilingual speakers already point to systematic differences worth pursuing. Third, broadening the cross-linguistic scope to include further Slavic languages (e.g., Ukrainian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, or Czech) would allow the factors identified to be evaluated against a wider comparative backdrop and shed new light on the East–West divide in Slavic aspect. Finally, incorporating historically relevant contact languages into the comparison (e.g., German as a long-standing contact language of the West Slavic languages) would provide an additional non-Slavic reference point and allow for a more nuanced assessment of whether observed tense–aspect patterns reflect inherited Slavic typology or contact-induced convergence.

Tore Nesset and Laura A. Janda

A Long Story about Short-Form Adjectives in Russian and Their Rivals

We analyze corpus data reflecting the form of predicate adjectives in Russian as short form, long form, or instrumental, as in gorod byl pust/pustoj/pustym ‘the town was empty’ (Nesset and Janda 2023, 2025). After excluding adjectives that lack either short or long forms and annotating available factors, we identify both contexts in which only one form prevails (in over 97% of attestations), as well as contexts in which there is true competition among forms. Altogether nine contexts are evaluated. Six contexts are categorically (or nearly so) restricted to the short form, one is restricted to the instrumental, and only two constitute “spaces of competition” where more than one form is regularly attested. One space of competition admits both the short and the long form, while the other additionally admits the instrumental. However, in both spaces of competition, the short form dominates: we find 67% short forms in the two-way competition, and 58% short forms in the three-way competition. While statistical analyses of the spaces of competition do turn up significant factors (word order, frequency, gender/number of the adjective, etc.), the effects are not very large. It is hypothesized that within the space of competition, the difference in forms serves to convey different meanings. Our analysis lends support to the idea that the short form is closely related to verbs and that the short form expresses temporary states, rather than inherent permanent characteristics.

References:
Nesset, T., Janda, L. A. 2023. The long and the short of it: Russian predicate adjectives with zero copula. Russian Linguistics 47, 299–321. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-023-09280-1Externer Link
Nesset, T., Janda, L. A. 2025. Contextually determined or semantically distinct? The competition between instrumental, long form nominative and short form nominative in Russian predicate adjectives. Russian Linguistics 49, 6. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-025-09314-wExterner Link

Ruprecht von Waldenfels

Spatial Particles Replacing Prefixes: Motion Verb Constructions in Slovenian

Abstract forthcoming.

Maria Shvedova & Olha Kanishcheva

An Ecosystem of Open Ukrainian Language Resources: Corpora, Annotation, and FAIR Compliance

Abstract forthcoming.