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Me and my project

I was born in 1973 in the glorious city of  Krasnoyarsk, Soviet Union. In 1994 I moved to Germany where I graduated in biology (Diplom 2004) and comparative linguistics (M.A. 2008) at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Language typology was the primary field of my academic interests which I pursued under the careful guidance of Prof. Dr. Walter Bisang. Apart from that, I studied Slavonic and Romance philology. During my studies I found particular pleasure in learning foreign languages of different genetic affiliations and acquired knowledge of varying degree of about 10 languages.

I have always desired to become involved in the process of description of endangered or/and underdescribed languages, therefore I was very glad when I got a PhD position at the ACLC which is funded by the NWO within the project “Tundra Yukagir, a nearly extinct Paleo-Asian Isolate in Arctic Russia: a Collection on CD/DVD of Linguistic and Folkloristic Materials of the Language and Culture of a Siberian People for Documentation, Education and Safeguarding for Posterity ”, which will be realized under the joint expert guidance of dr. Cecilia Odé and prof.dr. Kees Hengeveld.

Yukaghir is supposedly a language isolate. One must say, however, that a decisive answer to the question concerning its genetic relationship has no yet been foundalthough there have been attemptsto establish such a relationship, first of all with the Uralic family. There used to be several Yukaghir dialects/languages in the historical past. Nowadays Yukaghir is represented by two surviving distinct dialects, or, depending on the defining criteria, closely related languages: Tundra, or Northern, Yukaghir and Kolyma, or Southern, Yukaghir. The two dialects display many common grammatical features but have vocabularies that differ so much from each other that representatives of different dialects can hardly understand one another.

The number of speakers of both dialects probably does not exceed 100. The majority of them live in a few settlements in the basin of Kolyma and Alazeya rivers in the north-eastern Russia. The language, especially its southern dialect, is badly endangered. One of the goals of the project is to help revitalize Tundra Yukaghir by, among other things, assisting the native speakers in producing teaching materials for the schools.

My personal task within the project will be mainly writing a comprehensive descriptive grammar of Tundra Yukaghir with a special emphasis on morphosyntax based on the existing data as well as on the data I am going to collect during my field trips. There are already some descriptions of the language of different extent and style, but neither of them is full or conclusive with regard to certain aspects of the language. Considering the high typological value of Tundra Yukaghir, filling the gaps in its description is more than worthwhile.

Here are just a few features of Tundra Yukaghir that deserve special attention of a typologist:

-          morphological means are employed to encode the pragmatic function of focus

-          ergativity-split based on focus (a split condition relatively rarely attested in languages of the world) with the ergative being unmarked and the absolutive beingmarked (a constellation that to my knowledge is otherwise found only in a dialect of Dogon and Koryak); it has also an unusual secondary ergativity split triggered by person

-          violation of the greenbergian universal nr. 28 that posits that derivative morphemes are always between the root and inflectional morphemes if situated unilaterally 

-          obligatory formal detransitivization of transitive verbs in negative sentences with non-focal arguments

Presentations

At the 70 th parallel one speaks Tundra Yukaghir (poster) presented at the NWO-ELP conference on 'Language Documentation and Description in the Netherlands', 8-9 Apr. 2011, Leiden, the Netherlands

A closer look at ergativity in Tundra Yukaghir: Typological implications (poster, Second Prize Award) presented at the 44th International Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2011), 8-11 Sept. 2011, Logroño, Spain

Award sertificate

Best presentation Awards (SLE 2011)

The poster

Membership in academic bodies

Since 2011 I am a member of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE). I was granted the four year free membership in it as a sign of recognition for my poster presentation that had won the second prize award at the 44th SLE conference (see Presentations).