Russian through the eyes of a young researcher

Higher School of Economics - is the unique area, where particular attention is given traditionally to science. All students are equally engaged in research activities and share results of their findings participating in various scientific events. Students from the Faculty of Fundamental and Applied Linguistic, certainly, are not an exception. The majority of our undergraduates are enthusiastic about performing at intellectual conferences and congresses, taking part in hackathons and competitions. Thus, recently an inner institutional conference «Russian language in vision of a young researcher» was held and our youth scientists were involved in this enlightening process. We asked participants to introduce the themes of their report to share their acquired experience and impressions.

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The decision of taking part in the conference

The interest in such scientific events usually increases among the students of the every year. Many students, for example Lydia Vaskina and Ekaterina Antsiferova from the fourth bachelor course, come to the program with obtained school knowledge of competing in conferences, debates and intellectual olympiads, but still they look forward to attending such events with university and intercollegiate degrees. As for others, Julia Pirozhkova, the student of the third course, has enhanced her interest in the active involvement in research sphere for exchanging of the results of  her research work during her study at the Faculty of Fundamental and Applied Linguistics.The main reason, that motivated our students to take part in this intellectual meeting, was, naturally, a desire to share ideas and findings of their research with scientific community and to analyze every reflections and feedbacks given about academic work. Nevertheless, there were other encouraging factors for students.

Footage from Ekaterina's speech

For instance, Lydia Vaskina found it informative and exciting to be a part of a scientific conference, that was conducted in the online format. Besides, for Ekaterina Antsiferova and Julia Pirozhkova this educational event has become an excellent chance for training skills of public speaking. Julia  frankly admits, that initially  she felt anxious about performing in front of the audience, but last conference gave her opportunity to fix and improve the situation, she highlights: « It is significant to get yourself together and make a confident start!». For Ekaterina the access to free communication with representatives of scientific community enabled her to practice pre-defense of her final qualifying work: « I decided, that it will be a wonderful chance for training before my graduate degree, so I applied for participation and started to write an article».

 
Footage from the performance of Julia

Themes of reports and scientific interests

The theme of Ekaterina’s work on the conference was linked with urgent for up-to-date electronic communication problem of nicknames on the Internet. She is studying a gender aspect in the context of formulation of virtual personality, searching for opportunities to identify the gender of a certain person throughout his nickname on social networks.

 
Conference participant - Ekaterina Antsiferova (photo from personal archive)

Lydia made a report « Words- intensifiers as a way of the identification of author’s individual style of a written text». Intensifiers are the words, that exaggerate or reduce the value of certain signs, functions and actions, for example such adverbs as «very» and «very much» ( strongly). Idiostyle means the author’s idiolect, the manner of written speech that is peculiar for a special person. Intensifiers, as Lydia says, are widely used for problem-solving of text’s certain authorship.

 
Conference participant - Yulia Pirozhkova (photo from personal archive)

Julia’s presentation was dedicated to the  analysis of Sergey Dovlatov’s and Victor Astafiev’s individual styles. It was an attempt to find some parameters, features, based on which we can distinguish texts’ affiliation with a particular author. The main aim of the project was to automate the whole process. Julia fairly notices the complication of this task. « During my study on the program, I encounter сontroversial phenomena in linguistic science, since, on the one side, they might be complicated, versatile and difficult for systematization, on the other side, they cause sports interest and ardor. These phenomena are similar to tasks with increased complexity- they usually draw our attention and increase passion.

Authors of the article:
Krivenkova Ekaterina
Salimgareeva Aigul