Olesya Kisselev
University of South Carolina, USA
Dr. Olesya Kisselev is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at The University of South Carolina and major collaborator in the project “Hybrid STEP in the second language classroom” hosted at UiT and funded by the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills (2025-2027). Her primary research expertise lies in corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, especially as they apply to the study of second and heritage language development and maintenance, as well as various aspects of bi/multilingualism and diasporic language practices. Dr. Kisselev has a distinguished track record of funded research. She currently serves as the Co-Director of the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (CALPER) and the Director of the STARTALK Institute for Teachers: Proficiency-Based Pedagogy for Russian at the Middlebury College. Among her most recent achievements are the textbook Rodnaya Rech’: An Introductory Course for Heritage Learners of Russian (Georgetown University Press, 2021), which received the AATSEEL Book Prize Award for Best Contribution to Pedagogy (2023), and the co-edited volume Russian as a Heritage Language: From Research to Classroom Applications, dedicated to advances and innovations in Russian Heritage Language Pedagogy (Routledge, 2024).
Plenary talk:
Abstract Nouns, Concrete Constructions: Frequency, Formulaicity, and Development of Shell-Noun Patterns in Learner Russian
From a usage-based and constructionist perspective, language knowledge is understood as an inventory of form–meaning pairings—constructions—that range from fully schematic patterns to lexically specific sequences (Goldberg, 2005; Bybee, 2010). Grammatical development, in this view, consists not in the acquisition of abstract rules alone, but in the gradual entrenchment, expansion, and reorganization of constructions through exposure, use, and increasing sensitivity to distributional patterns. For second language (L2) and heritage language (HL) learners, this process is shaped by frequency effects, prior linguistic experience, and register-specific demands, particularly in academic writing.
Within academic discourse, shell nouns—abstract nouns such as problem, question, idea, and process—play a crucial role in structuring argumentation, enabling syntactic compression, and establishing cohesive links across clauses and sentences. Traditionally, shell nouns have been treated primarily as lexical items whose meanings are underspecified and completed by surrounding discourse (Schmid, 2000), or as “signaling nouns” that guide readers through complex texts (Flowerdew, 2006). From a constructionist standpoint, however, shell nouns are more productively analyzed as participants in recurrent lexico-grammatical constructions that pair specific formal configurations with discourse-functional meanings.
For example, patterns such as problema[problem]+Genitive, problema[problem]+s[with]+ Instrumental, problema zaključaets'a v tom, čto[problem is contained in that.LOC]…, or rešat' problemu[solve problem.ACC] are not merely compositional combinations of a noun with cases or verbs. Rather, they constitute conventionalized constructions that encode particular ways of construing abstract entities, attributing causality, delimiting scope, or framing argumentative moves. These constructions vary in schematicity: some are relatively fixed and formulaic, while others allow for internal variation and expansion. Crucially, their acquisition requires learners to coordinate morphology, syntax, lexis, and discourse function simultaneously.
From this perspective, difficulties that learners experience with shell nouns in academic writing are not simply lexical gaps or isolated grammatical errors. Instead, they reflect the challenge of acquiring constructional networks associated with abstract reference and academic stance—networks that are highly frequent, register-specific, and only partially transparent from general grammatical knowledge. At the same time, increased and more target-like use of shell-noun constructions may serve as an important indicator of advanced literacy development, signaling learners’ growing control over discourse-organizing resources in the target language.
While constructionist approaches have been widely applied to the study of argument structure, morphology, and formulaic language in L2 acquisition, relatively little attention has been paid to abstract-noun constructions in morphologically rich languages such as Russian. Existing research on shell nouns has focused primarily on English academic writing, leaving open questions about how such constructions emerge, diversify, and conventionalize in learner Russian, and how this process differs for heritage and non-heritage learners.
The present study addresses this gap by examining shell-noun constructions in a longitudinal corpus of advanced learner Russian academic writing. Extending earlier work that focused on a single high-frequency shell noun (problema[problem]), this study analyzes a set of frequent shell nouns as nodes in a broader constructional system. Drawing on corpus-based methods, the analysis traces the frequency, structural diversity, accuracy, collocational behavior, and developmental trajectories of shell-noun constructions across proficiency levels and learner backgrounds, with reference to comparable patterns in native-speaker usage.
By treating shell nouns as constructions rather than isolated lexical items, this study contributes to a usage-based understanding of advanced L2 and HL development in academic registers. More broadly, it argues that shell-noun constructions offer a particularly revealing window into how learners acquire discourse-level constructions that integrate grammar, lexis, and argumentation in a second or heritage language.
References:
Bybee, J. (2010). Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Flowerdew, J. (2006). Use of signaling nouns in a learner corpus. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 11(3), 345-362.
Goldberg, A. (2005). Constructions at work. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Schmid, H. (2000). English abstract nouns as conceptual shells: From corpus to cognition. Berlin/NewYork: Mouton de Gruyter.
