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Dagmar Divjak on Cognitive Corpus Linguistics and Cooperation with the HSE
Dagmar Divjak is Reader in Slavic Languages and Linguistics and co-director of the Centre for Linguistic Research at the University of Sheffield’s School of Modern Languages and Linguistics.― Could you tell us a little about your area of expertise and research interests?
― My main research interests are in understanding how our cognitive capacities give rise to the patterns and structures we see in language and in describing linguistic phenomena in a cognitively realistic way, i.e., in a way that captures what matters to the speakers of a language. Because of my background in usage-based cognitive corpus linguistics, frequency in all its guises plays a central role in my work.
― What is your lecture series about?
― I'm going to talk about the quantitative turn in Cognitive Linguistics and showcase some of the projects I have done to illustrate the advantages of using corpus data, analyzing corpus data statistically, and validating the results experimentally.
― How did you your cooperation with the HSE start?
― I've know one of the professors, Ekaterina Rakhilina, since 2002, when I was working on my PhD. Katja was kind enough to mentor me during one of my stays in Moscow. I'd never worked with such a knowledgeable and approachable supervisor, so this experience was a real turning point for me and we've stayed in touch ever since.
― What are your expectations for this international cooperation?
― We've got a number of shared research interests (lexical semantics, among other things) and we've got complementary areas of expertise, which means that we're in an ideal position to collaborate on projects that push at the boundaries of the discipline and really move things forward. We've also got plans to set up a joint state-of-the-art MA programme in Linguistics that provides students with the opportunity to study both at home and abroad with experts in their fields and to participate in authentic research projects - two things that are essential when training future research leaders.
― Have you been to Moscow before? What are your plans for sightseeing?
― Yes, I have. I think I must have spent about 9 months here in total during the years I was working on my PhD. I've got quite a busy schedule this week, with lectures in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod, but I hope to get to the Red Square and sneak in to a museum and a few bookstores. When I travel to Russia, I always make sure to pack little so that I leave enough space for books on my way back!
Anna Chernyakhovskaya, specially for the HSE news service