New senior lecturer in Russian at Modern Languages

2020-12-21

Anastasia Makarova has joined the Department of Modern Languages as a senior lecturer in Russian. Anastasia Makarova has most recently been working at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, where she did her PhD, and subsequently spent the last decade. Makarova has graduated from S:t Petersburg State University where she studied Russian and linguistics. 

Anastasia Makarova specialised in theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics during her university studies. She also has a diploma in Russian as a foreign language and a MA degree in Russian. In her doctoral thesis, she uses corpus analysis as well as experiments and quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Makarova's scholarly interests range from Russian aspect, aktionsart and deictic words to language change and error analysis in spontaneous speech. She has also used corpus data in comparative and diachronic studies and she has had articles published in journals like Russian linguistics, Voprosy jazykoznanija, The Journal of Historical Linguistics, Diachronica, Scando-Slavica, Zeitschrift für Slawistik. Makarova is an associate member in the research group ”Cognitive Linguistics: Empirical Approaches to Russian (Clear)” with the aim of building electronic resources that support research-based student-centred language pedagogy.

Anastasia Makarova thus goes from the northernmost university of the world to the oldest university in the Nordic region. What are her plans now?

“It is exciting to begin working at Uppsala University, which has a long tradition of excellent research in Russian and Slavic language history, and to contribute with a different perspective with more of a focus on modern Russian, primarily grammar, replies Anastasia Makarova. An area that I have begun to study now is ingressivity, how to express the beginning of an action. Verbs for the beginning of a movement or a sound, for example, can be expressed in different ways. One is to use the construction načat’/stat’, which means to begin, together with an imperfect verb. Načat’/stat’ kričat’ for example means beginning to scream. A different way is to use the prefix za- to express an ingressive aktionsart. Zakričat’ thus also means beginning to scream. But although the meaning is the same, the different ways are not used as frequently, and the choice between them is not entirely free. I want to find out why it is that way. What makes one of the alternatives more frequent in some contexts?”

Anastasia Makarovas profile page

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Last modified: 2021-09-14