Job description

I am a member of the CLEAR research group and Tromsø Constructicon lab. My PhD is a part of the THREAT-DEFUSER project. 

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 research project aims to investigate how Russian grammar can be represented as a network of closely interrelated constructions. The title of my doctoral dissertation is A Constructivist Approach to Russian Grammar: Lessons from the Russian Constructicon. In the dissertation, I focus on the following research questions: 

• RQ1 How to structure a model of Russian grammar in terms of multi-word constructions?
• RQ2 How do semantic relationships among constructions contribute to the internal organization of the Russian Constructicon?
• RQ3 How do syntactic relationships among constructions contribute to the organization of the Russian Constructicon?
• RQ4 In what ways does the Russian Constructicon serve as both a research tool and a theoretical model for analyzing Russian constructions?
• RQ5 To what extent can pragmatic meanings, such as threats, be represented and systematized within a constructicon?

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.