ASU News

From April 6 to 9, third-year students from the Faculty of Philology, the Faculty of Foreign Languages, and the Faculty of Adyghe Philology and Culture participated in a specialized workshop with visiting expert Alina Russkikh. She is a senior lecturer at the HSE School of Linguistics and a researcher at the International Linguistic Convergence Laboratory.

The intensive course featured a lecture titled "Languages of Russia: How and Why to Study Them," as well as a workshop called "Working with an Oral Corpus of the Chuvash Language." During the workshop, students explored the meanings of the additive marker and learned how to work with glosses. They gained practical skills in working with an oral corpus of an unfamiliar language: how to search the corpus by glosses and extract relevant data.

Following the training, each student conducted a brief study utilizing their newly acquired skills, focusing on the topic "Meanings of the Additive Marker in the Chuvash Language." They analyzed their collected data and drew conclusions about the functions in which the additive marker can be used in Chuvash.

The intensive program also included a master class titled "Linguistic Interviews as a Method for Studying Sociolinguistic Variables," led by invited native speakers. The master class comprised two parts: theoretical and practical. The lecture covered the methodological and technical aspects of recording linguistic interviews. During the practical segment, students were divided into groups, each responsible for analyzing the same linguistic phenomenon in Russian but within different contexts.

This is the third year in which the cluster's three educational programs have incorporated the course "Modern Approaches to Linguistics" into their curricula. Yuri Lander, the Academic Director of the HSE "Fundamental and Computational Linguistics" program, played a key role in organizing the course. Over the past three years, young HSE researchers Elena Shvedova, Maxim Melenchenko, Anastasia Dobrynina, and Gleb Bubnov have also collaborated with the students. Last year, ASU students, under Yuri Lander's guidance, participated in a linguistic field expedition to villages in Adygea for the first time. This year, the expeditions are set to continue, and the knowledge and skills gained during the intensive course will enable students to collect and analyze linguistic data effectively and competently.