Slavic cognitive linguistics in Tromsø

Laura A. Janda
Tore Nesset
Olga Lyashevskaya
Svetlana Sokolova
Julia Kuznetsova

GOOD NEWS! In April 2008, the Slavic cognitive linguistics research group was awarded a grant of NOK 86 000 from Sparebankens Gavefond. We plan to hire a student assistant and invite two guest researchers.

Exploring Emptiness September 2009

From the very beginning, cognitive linguistics has been a refuge for
linguists who are intimately acquainted with real language data and have a profound respect for empirical methods. The most outstanding contributions made by cognitive linguists continue to be insightful analyses of intricate sets of naturally-occurring data performed by linguists with a subtle and detailed understanding of the languages they work on. These tendencies are well-supported by both the community of Slavists and their traditional approach to their data. The historical circumstances and present-day realities of the Slavic languages yield a situation with many attractions for a cognitive linguist, both in terms of the range of linguistic phenomena available and the theoretical orientation of colleagues in the field.

The Slavic languages have few, if any, peers worldwide in terms of the size of this family of languages and the documentation of their characteristics, both diachronic and synchronic. It may be an overstatement to say “If it has happened in any language, it has happened in a Slavic language”, but this claim is not far from the mark: most known linguistic phenomena do indeed have Slavic parallels. The Slavic languages themselves provide plenty of inducement for a cognitive linguist, but into the bargain one can enjoy the company they keep, namely Slavic linguists both in the countries where they are spoken and around the globe. The repressive totalitarian regimes that dominated these countries for much of the twentieth century forced many into exile and imposed censorship on those who remained. These unfortunate measures had an unintended result, creating an environment that was particularly functionalist-friendly for Slavists on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Both Tore Nesset and Laura Janda have dedicated their careers to the analysis of Slavic phenomena through the lens of cognitive linguistics. They are currently involved in two closely related research projects. One is  called “Exploring Emptiness” and involves the semantic and paradigmatic behavior of verbal morphemes in Russian. The second project is called "Modeling Clusters of Russian Verbs" and is concerned with the aspectual relationships among Russian verbs.

In 2007/2008 Olga Lashevskaja and Svetlana Sokolova joined the Slavic Cognitive Linguistics in Tromsø research group. We are proud and happy to welcome our new researchers to Tromsø! In the fall 2008, Julia Kuznetsova joined our group - we are very happy about that.

If you are interested in studying cognitive linguistics at the University of Tromsø, please download this information  brochure or contact Tore Nesset or Laura Janda.

See also these links to International Cognitive Linguistics Association and Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Association