This dissertation maps the left-periphery of the Russian language, presenting a new geometry of Russian main and subordinate clauses in order to account for a number of phenomena: single and multiple wh-constructions, sluicing constructions, and coordinate multiple wh-constructions (CMW), as well as to predict various occurring word-orders.…

Foreign language educators have been striving to improve practices that support language teaching for adults for many years. Common knowledge insists that children are better language learners than adults. Creation of the new field of neurolinguistics at the end of the 20th century brought about new opportunities for both teachers of foreign…

Heritage language (HL) is a linguistic system that arises in the context of early childhood bilingualism, both sequential and simultaneous, when one of the languages is not fully acquired. The performance of speech acts in HLs is yet to be understood, and this dissertation is a first step in this direction. The study investigates the pragmatic…

The purpose of this dissertation is twofold-to investigate, in brief, the available guides to Russian lyric diction and to present my own comprehensive guide, which gives singers the tools to prepare the pronunciation of Russian vocal pieces independently. The survey examines four guides to Russian lyric diction found in popular anthologies or…

This dissertation examines the phenomenon of ethical datives (EDs) in two Slavic languages, Russian and Macedonian. EDs are defined through a pragmatic lens as discourse licensed perspective markers in which a dative form expresses a speaker's decision to signal someone's emotional attitude--real or perceived--toward the action. Owing to…

The present study is a corpus-based comparative investigation of Theme and thematic progression in English and Russian. While monolingual thematic studies have a long history in Linguistics, comparative studies are relatively few, in particular for the given language pair. In addition to filling the existing gap in the field of Translation…

In Contemporary Standard Russian (CSR) and Contemporary Standard Polish (CSP) nominal possession is conveyed by means of the adnominal genitive. In this construction the dependent follows the noun it modifies and is marked morphologically for possession in the genitive case. The head noun is marked morphologically for any one of the six…

This dissertation proposes a structured semantic account of the polysemous Russian verbal prefix "po-" within the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics and using corpus linguistic methods. While scholarly consensus identifies five meanings for "po-" and an additional meaning in conjunction with the suffix--"yva"--, the relationships among…

Using a data-driven qualitative approach and drawing from language socialization and communities of practice theories, this dissertation study examines the second language (L2) identity-building strategies of 22 American learners of Russian who engaged in a six-week telecollaborative project with Russian native speakers in two genres of…

Russian legal-administrative documents from the early fourteenth through the mid-seventeenth century (Middle Russian) show extensive variation in expressing possessivity within the noun phrase. Possessor expressions can be conveyed by morphologically derived possessive adjectives, adnominal genitives, or by combinations of those constructions…

This dissertation explores the diversity and unity of coordination constructions in natural language. Following the goal of bridging syntactic typology with formal semantics, it takes the typological variation in NP coordination patterns as a challenge for semantic theory. Hybrid Coordination in Russian and Comitative Coordination in…

As face-threatening speech acts, requests are of particular interest to second language acquisition scholars. They affect the interlocutors' public self-images, and thus require a careful consideration of the social distance between the interlocutors, their status, and the level of the imposition, factors that are weighed differently in…

Despite considerable evidence suggesting that second language (L2) learners experience difficulties when processing morphosyntactic aspects of L2 in online tasks, the mechanisms underlying these difficulties remain unknown. The aim of this dissertation is to explore possible causes for the difficulties by comparing attentional mechanisms engaged…

This study investigates the coherence properties of non-finite complements in Russian, Serbian/Croatian, and Macedonian. I demonstrate that Slavic non-finite complements do not project a uniform syntactic structure. The maximal projection of non-finite complements is not fixed but depends on the selectional properties of the matrix verb. I present…

The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a comprehensive analysis of gender assignment in Contemporary Standard Russian within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). The result of the dissertation is the establishment of the phonological, morphological, semantic, and faithfulness constraints necessary to assign…