Indian Summer School in Linguistics

The Indian Summer School in Linguistics — one of the HSE's summer schools — recently ended at the Faculty of Philology. Every day between September 1 and 5, dozens of students from the HSE and other Moscow universities and research centers attended lectures in linguistic typology—a subset of linguistics which compares both related and unrelated languages ​​to determine what is universal, what can vary, and what is impossible in language.

Languages ​​may be similar or different in terms of their typology; they may be related or totally unrelated in origin; and their areas of ​​distribution may be close to one another or spread far apart. In her course, Johanna Nichols of the University of California, Berkeley, discussed how linguists can operate with complex variables using all these coordinate systems. A course by Michael Dunn of the Uppsala University Department of Linguistics and Philology examined the theoretical foundations and quantitative methods used in linguistic phylogenetics; he used examples from vocabulary, syntax, and sociolinguistics to illustrate the many different options for phylogenetic analysis.

Walter Bisang of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz led a course focusing on linguistic change and how it operates in situations of language contact, and on hidden as well as explicit linguistic complexity. Hrach Martirosyan spoke about the place of Armenian in the Indo-European language family ​​and explained the origins and history of the Armenian language system, so that by the end of his course students were able to easily read and translate a text fragment in Armenian. Francisco Queixalos of the CNRS, Paris, covered the linguistic diversity of some Central and South American languages and used them to illustrate why conventional Eurocentric terms are not always suitable for describing New World languages.

The School's programme was not limited to an overview of international linguistic studies, but also offered students from the HSE and other leading Russian universities an opportunity to discuss their own research with prominent international linguists. After the lectures on September 2 and 4, some students presented their papers at a poster session—all 30 presentations were delivered in English.

“The lecturers were pleasantly surprised at the high quality of the students' papers,” says Natalia Zevahina, Lecturer at the Faculty of Philology. “They even asked to look at the papers in more detail after the poster sessions; so we set up a separate page on the Summer School website where students can post their material. Our lecturers intend to contact the authors of particularly interesting papers with their comments.”