Job description

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in Russian Cognitive Linguistics at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. I am a member of the CLEAR research group and Tromsø Constructicon lab. 

In March 2026, I defended my PhD dissertation, A Constructivist Approach to Russian Grammar: Lessons from the Russian Constructicon. The dissertation investigated how Russian grammar can be represented as a network of closely interrelated multi-word grammatical constructions. In Spring semester 2024 I had my research stay at Harvard University (USA), where I was affiliated as a visiting scholar with the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian studies.

My postdoctoral project, CONNECT: Constructional Negation in the Network of the Russian Constructicon, builds directly on this work. CONNECT investigates how negation functions as a constructional dimension across the Russian Constructicon, combining corpus-based analysis with targeted case studies of constructional families. The project addresses:

• Which semantic domains are characterized by an active use of negation, and what role negation plays in those constructions
• To what extent constructions can be placed on a gradient from positive to negative polarity, and how this correlates with semantic type
• How implicit negation is encoded grammatically, and how it differs from explicit negation in usage
• The role of negation within specific semantic domains, such as degree-of-intensity constructions

Beyond peer-reviewed articles, CONNECT will result in a systematic, database-wide revision of the Constructicon's entries.

I am a lead developer of the Russian Constructicon, a free open-access electronic resource that offers a searchable database of over 4,000 multiword grammatical constructions of Russian. An overview of the project, including the semantic classification developed in the Russian Constructicon, is available in my conference presentation. My responsibilities include: 

• Content development and interface design
• Recruitment and supervision of student contributors
• Workflow organization and project coordination
• FAIR data management and documentation; development of annotation guidelines, data organization principles, and consistency standards
• Dissemination and outreach

I have also participated in creating two educational resources:

1. SMARTool
   A free web resource for L2 learners of Russian that implements findings of a learning simulation experiment and corpus research to optimize the acquisition of Russian vocabulary and morphology. The SMARTool provides the users with 1-3 most frequent wordforms for a basic vocabulary of 3000 nouns, adjectives, and verbs culled from major textbooks and other sources to represent levels A1, A2, B1, and B2 (CEFR scale). For each word form, there is a corpus-based example sentence instantiating typical use.  
   
   
2. Construxercise! Hands-on learning of Russian constructions
   A free web resource that offers learners (A2-B1 CEFR) and teachers of Russian 12 lessons with over 180 exercises that significantly strengthen text production skills. The exercises target strategic sets of Russian constructions (prominent patterns of sentence and phrase structures) that organize the flow of speech and help to achieve native-like fluency in speaking and writing.