This collection provides a comprehensive overview of Russian language research in Canada and Russia, with a focus on elements of structure, as well as on language dynamics and change.

This volume represents an overview of current research on Slavic linguistics in Europe and North America based on selected papers presented during the 6th Annual Meeting of the Slavic Linguistics Society (September 1-3, 2011, Aix-en-Provence, France). It includes topics across a range of linguistic fields (morphosyntax, syntax, and semantics) and discussions on specific aspects of Slavic languages within a typological perspective. All the papers illustrate a range of approaches, and each paper presents rigorous analysis of a set of Slavic data within the context of various models and aspects of language. While the main focus of the collection is impersonal constructions in Slavic languages, the book also includes morphological topics, such as reflexives, antipassive and evidential markers, syntactical relations with zero sign, auxiliary verbs and subordinate clauses, and semantics of nouns, adverbs and adjectives. The volume will be of interest to all scholars studying Slavic languages as well as those interested in general linguistics and linguistic typology.

The former Soviet Union (USSR) provides the ideal territory for studying language contact between one and the same dominant language (Russian) and a wide range of genealogically and typologically diverse languages with varying histories of language contact. This is the first book that bundles different case studies and systematically investigates the impact of Russian at all linguistic levels, from the lexicon to the domains of grammar to discourse, and with varying types of outcomes such as relatively rapid language shift, structural changes in a relatively stable contact situation, pidginization and super variability at the post-pidgin stage. The volume appeals to linguists studying language contact and contact-induced language change from a broad range of perspectives, who want to gain insight into how one of the largest languages in the world influences other smaller languages, but also experts of mostly minority languages in the sphere of the former Soviet Union.

This book provides an accessible introduction to the linguistic structure of Russian, including its history, dialects and sociolinguistics, as well as the central issues of phonology, morphology, syntax and word formation/lexicology. It particularly emphasises the special linguistic features of Russian which are not shared with English and other non-Slavic languages. For intermediate/advanced students of Russian, this will help to reinforce their understanding of how all levels of Russian function. Students and scholars of linguistics will find it a useful starting point for comparative work involving the structure of Russian and the Slavic languages, or issues such as standardisation, multilingualism, and the fate of former colonial languages. Each chapter begins with an introduction to the basic theoretical concepts of the area covered, presenting the linguistic facts and relationships in an easily accessible form. It will also serve as a learning aid to Cyrillic, with all examples transliterated.

This edited collection presents a range of methods that can be used to analyse linguistic data quantitatively. A series of case studies of Russian data spanning different aspects of modern linguistics serve as the basis for a discussion of methodological and theoretical issues in linguistic data analysis. The book presents current trends in quantitative linguistics, evaluates methods and presents the advantages and disadvantages of each. The chapters contain introductions to the methods and relevant references for further reading. This will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in the area of quantitative and Slavic linguistics.

This book focuses on how Russia has perpetually redefined Russianness in reaction to the wider world. Treating culture as an expanding field, it offers original case studies in Russia’s imperial entanglements; the life of things ‘Russian’, including the language, beyond the nation’s boundaries, and Russia’s positioning in the globalized world.

This book explores a comprehensive set of tensions which emerged from the dislocated and deterritorialised position of Russian in the contemporary world from a sociolinguistic perspective.