Speaker: Steven Clancy (Harvard University)
Abstract: There is a long tradition in Slavic linguistics and cognitive linguistics of adapting our theoretical understanding of language for pedagogical purposes and this is no less true in times of exciting new technologies. In this talk, I will present some new approaches to language teaching that effectively adapt the “quantitative turn” in theoretical linguistic research to the needs of language teachers and learners. Inspired by usage-based, constructional approaches to language and informed by vocabulary frequency, the Visualizing Russian (https://visualizingrussian.fas.harvard.edu) project is a suite of tools benefiting language learners, teachers, and researchers and enabling each user-group to access the complex system of the Russian language through visualization methods in order to leverage the powers of compression and expansion of a massive dataset. Tools developed so far analyze texts for relative difficulty with regard to vocabulary content, create frequency lists and display word forms used for each lemma in a text, compare target vocabulary to coverage in a text, identify the most commonly used word forms for a lemma, compare the relative frequency of near-synonyms or other items in a semantic domain, show the usage of nouns with various cases or verbs with various person/number/tense/aspect combinations, and identify the case governance or preposition usage of Russian verbs. Additional tools break down word-formation for prefixes-roots-suffixes in words and identify the field of morphologically-related or semantically-related words for any target word. These tools have contributed to the creation of a new Russian textbook series, Foundations of Russian (Clancy, Egorova, Green, Willis, forthcoming from Routledge Publishers), which presents a 4000-word vocabulary based on the most frequently occurring and communicatively necessary words in Russian.
About Steven Clancy: Steven Clancy is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Slavic Language Program at Harvard University. Research interests include cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics and quantitative methods with data from Russian, Czech, and Polish.
Publications include the The Chain of BEING and HAVING in Slavic, “The ascent of guy”, and two books on Slavic case semantics with Laura Janda: Case Book for Russian (2002) and Case Book for Czech (2006). A new intermediate Russian textbook, Foundations of Russian, is in the works for Routledge Publishers together with Veronika Egorova, Daniel Green, and Oksana Willis.
