Last Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, the linguists of Moscow State University and Moscow State Pedagogical University hosted the second workshop on Formal Approaches to Russian Linguistics, with several MIT connections. The excellent conference was organized by frequent MIT visitor, former Fulbright Fellow and former visiting faculty Sergei Tatevosov and his colleague Ekaterina Lyutikova. David Pesetsky and alum Ora Matushansky (PhD 2002) were the invited speakers. David’s talk was entitled “Clause size and Nominal size: towards a derivational theory of both”. Ora, well-known for her work on semantics, syntax and morpology, spoke about … Russian phonology — specifically “A problem in the Hallean approach to the Russian verb”. In addition, alum Natasha Ivlieva (PhD 2013) of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics presented a talk on to li…to li disjunctions and Tatiana Bondarenko, a member of next Fall’s incoming class (!), spoke about “Russian applicatives and the lexical decomposition”. After FARL, David Pesetsky also presented a colloquium talk on his research concerning clause size at Moscow State University.
the conference dinner. From left to right: Katya Lyutikova, David Pesetsky, Misha Knyazev, Natasha Ivlieva, Maria Vassilyéva, Tatiana Bondarenko, Sergei Tatevosov