Specifically oriented towards Russian culture, this study addresses the need in diplomacy for deeper cultural understanding. As research suggests a link between the inclusion of religious perspectives in second language acquisition (SLA) and student motivation and cultural empathy, this study examines how Russian language classrooms could leverage an understanding of Russian religious themes to foster cultural sensitivity. The study invited 24 second-year university students of Russian to complete a previously-validated assessment of cultural sensitivity: the Global Perspectives Inventory (GPI). Divided into a control and a treatment group, the participants also watched a short video depicting a story from Russian history on the interactive video platform, Ayamel. The control group viewed a set of 10 extra-textual annotations containing Russian cultural material highlighting secular themes from Russian culture, while the treatment group reviewed 10 that were more spiritually-themed. After viewing the respective annotations, participants completed a short, open-ended, Video Response Questionnaire (VRQ), and completed a GPI post-test. The findings from the VRQ suggested that the video intervention tended to challenge participants' previous perceptions of Russia, noted a general increase in positive, self-reported perspectives of Russian culture, and revealed a tendency in the treatment group to more often portray Russia as a multi-faceted, rather than monolithic, cultural entity. The comparison of the GPI pre-test and post-test scores revealed an inverse interaction between the collective scores of the control and treatment groups on two questions gauging affective responses to culture. For each of these questions on the post-test, the treatment group's collective score slightly increased and the control group's collective score slightly fell.The findings suggest that interaction with religious themes in SLA may promote feelings of commonality and empathy with a foreign culture. As the relative, religious homogeneity of the sample constitutes a threat to the external validity of this study, the researchers invite similar tests to be conducted in SLA among different population types.

The theory of the Universal Grammar developed by Chomsky has been known for many years. The main idea behind the theory was that the processing of the language does not depend on the culture but it universal among all the languages. Further psycholinguistic studies developed the ideas about schematic comprehension of the language, giving rise to the idea of the "garden path effect". Research focused on the processing of the ambiguous sentences and found the tendency for readers to prefer interpretations of specific sentence areas as objects. The current study summarizes the ideas of psycholinguistic study and incorporates a novel language structure to study readers' syntactic preferences. In addition, conducting the study in Russian language accompanies previous research in other languages, also arguing in favor of the Universal Grammar model given the hypothesis was supported. It was hypothesized that readers would prefer the comparison of the two direct objects over the subjects, which would be reflected by faster reading times. Self-paced reading ask was administered to the participants in order to measure their reading times. The analysis found no significant differences in the reading times of the critical area, thus hypothesis was not supported. Possible explanations, limitations, and further directions are discussed.

This study examines how two media sources—one Russian and one Ukrainian—portray Russia and Ukraine before, during, and after the EuroMaidan crisis in Ukraine. Russian-language texts posted between January 2013 and December 2015 on the sites Ukranews.com (a Ukrainian news outlet) and TASS.ru (Russian) were organized in a corpus of over 20,000,000 words. This study analyzes the nouns “Россия” (“Russia”) and “Украина” (“Ukraine”) according to the verbal predicates that attach to either noun. The results demonstrate predictable variation in the agency of the two entities in response to cultural events and contexts. The analysis of the corpus data operationalizes a combined model of agency using Halliday and Matheissen’s (2004) classification of processes, shaped by the animacy of the actor, and Dik’s (1989) States of Affairs Matrix, which prioritizes the actor’s physical effect in space and time. In this study, predicates of “Russia” and “Ukraine” are given numeric scores based on the models. Then, a new method of checking the validity of these models is tested by examining other entities that take the same predicates as Russia and Ukraine. Measurements from discrete time periods reveal how the agency of both entities changed before, during, and after EuroMaidan.

This study investigates the translation process of three translator students and their production of translated non-fiction texts. The students are followed from an initial examination task over a period of time of 5 years. The translated texts produced during this period are analysed with selected methods of text analysis, which is compared to their source texts. The text analysis focuses on certain grammatical features that are known to generate problems for translators with the language pair Russian – Swedish. The results of the analysis show that the systematic differences in the languages involved are not as problematic as expected for the participants. Writing skills in the TL, translation principles and initial beliefs as well as the individual’s approach concerning the task of a translator turn out to have the most significant influences on the participants’ performance. In a complementary analysis, introspection data obtained from concurrent verbalisations are analysed according to a model that allows indicating and classifying marked processing in the translations. The role of contrastive language knowledge is especially emphasised in this part of the study. The results are put in relation to each other to obtain a picture of the individual development of the participating translator students. The three case studies show that each participant developed his/her competence during the time of the study. They also show that this development stays within a conceptual frame set by the participants before they started their training as translators. The implications for translator training that can be drawn from this study are mainly concerned with the importance of writing skills in the TL, contrastive language knowledge and the importance of questioning individual beliefs and principles concerning the task of the translator as well as approaches to translating.

Dans cette thèse, nous avons étudié d’une manière structurée et détaillée la sémantique des verbes gnat’ et gonjat’. Pour cela, nous avons tout d’abord formalisé leur potentiel sémantique qui comprend les composants de leur valeur de base et ce qu’ils génèrent dans des situations nouvelles, dans des cotextes particuliers. Pour chaque valeur sémantique, nous avons présenté un schéma sémantique, un schéma actantiel en précisant les rôles sémantiques, la nature des actants et leur réalisation syntaxique, ainsi que des illustrations d’emploi dans des cotextes des plus représentatifs, des synonymes, la famille morphologique. Les valeurs plus ou moins communes à gnat’ et à gonjat’ ont été étudiées ensemble, ce qui nous a permis de mettre en évidence leurs similitudes et différences. Puis, nous avons traité la question de la catégorie grammaticale des verbes de mouvement. Après avoir exposé les propriétés traditionnellement attribuées aux corrélats déterminé / indéterminé et les particularités qui sont générées dans l’emploi de chacun de ces corrélats, nous avons analysé la corrélation déterminé / indéterminé en général, et en particulier, entre gnat’ et gonjat’. Faisant partie de la catégorie grammaticale des verbes de mouvement, gnat’ et gonjat’ s’opposent sur le plan grammatical en tant que déterminé vs indéterminé et leurs caractéristiques grammaticales induisent quelques différences sémantiques. Ainsi, la plupart des différences observées entre gnat’ et gonjat’ ne sont pas en fait pas d’ordre lexical, mais résultent des différences grammaticales du déterminé gnat’ et de l’indéterminé gonjat’. Dans la partie consacrée à la dérivation morphologique, nous avons eu pour objectif d’examiner les effets de la préverbation et les modifications de sens que la préverbation entraîne pour ces verbes. Nous avons étudié les préverbés formés sur la base de gnat’ / gonjat’ à valeur spatiale en les regroupant en fonction de l’orientation spatiale : à partir du point de départ, vers le point d’arrivée, les deux en même temps ou en rapport avec un repère. Une attention minutieuse a été accordée aux différences sémantiques et aspectuelles de certains préverbés partageant les mêmes valeurs spatiales. L’étude des préverbés combinés aux préverbes à valeur non spatiale a été organisée en fonction de la morphologie de l’aspect : les préverbés hors couple et les couples de verbes. Quelques particularités ont été observées. Pour que l’étude sémantique soit complète, nous y avons inclus la question des phrasèmes comportant ces verbes. Puis, nous avons analysé le parallélisme qui existe entre gnat’ / gonjat’ simples et préverbés et le verbe dit de position sidet’ : les valeurs que ces verbes ont en commun et aussi, les limites de leur corrélation, Enfin, en partant directement des situations linguistiques concrètes avec gnat’ / gonjat’ simples et préverbés nous avons exposé un certain nombre de mécanismes qui aboutissent à un effet expressif. / In this thesis, we have studied the semantics of the verbs gnat’ and gonjat’ in a structured and extensive way. To achieve this, we began by structuring their semantic potential, which includes their basic value and what it produces in new situations, in specific cotexts. For each semantic value, we have presented a semantic schema, mapping the semantic roles of the actants, their nature and their syntactic development, together with examples of usage in the most representative cotexts, the synonyms, the morphological family. The more or less common values of gnat’ and gonjat’ have been studied together, so that we could bring their similarities and differences to light. Then, we dealt with the question of the grammatical category of the verbs of motion. Having presented the usually attributed properties of the correlate determined / indetermined and the particularities that emerge in the usage of each of these correlates, we have focused on the determined / indetermined correlation in general and between gnat’ and gonjat’ in particular. While belonging to the same grammatical category of the verbs of motion, both gnat’ and gonjat’ are opposed on a grammatical level, as determined and indetermined, and their grammatical characteristics lead to some semantical differences. Hence, most of the observed differences between gnat’ and gonjat’ are not of a lexical type; they are rather the result of the semantical differences between the determined gnat’ and the indetermined gonjat’. In the part of our thesis dedicated to morphological derivation, our goal was to study the impacts of verbal prefixation and the change of meaning as a result of the prefixation for these verbs. We have studied prefixed verbs based on gnat’ / gonjat’ with spatial meanings, clustering them depending on their spatial orientation: from the starting point, to the point of arrival, both at the same time or in relation to a landmark. A particular focus has been placed on the semantical and aspectual differences of some verbs with prefixes that share the same spatial values. The analysis of verbs with spatial prefixes was done according to the morphology of the aspect: the verbs with prefixes outside aspectual pairs and the pair of verbs. Some particularities have been observed. For the semantic study to be complete, we have added the question of the phrasemes using these verbs. Then, we studied the similarity between gnat’ and gonjat’ in their simple and prefixed forms and the verb of position sidet’: what those verbs have in common but also the limits of their similarities. Finally, we have taken concrete linguistic situations involving gnat’ and gonjat’ in their simple and prefixed forms in order to outline a number of mechanisms leading to an expressive result.

Dans cette thèse sur la concession en russe moderne, nous avons cerné cette notion en élaborant un schéma prototypique servant à classer différents types de constructions concessives et à intégrer le maximum de structures marquées comme concessives. Ainsi le schéma proposé (p, Cq), basé sur la notion de contraste entre les implications des contenus de p et q, les évaluations de ces contenus ou les actes illocutoires p et q, prend pour principal repère C, conjonction ou préposition concessive. Nous avons étudié la relation concessive dans des constructions bi-Propositives et des propositions simples. Cet ensemble est classé en fonction du statut épistémique de q, puis subdivisé en non-Conditionnel, conditionnel ou contrefactuel. Le deuxième critère de classement est le statut unique ou multiple de q. Dans le premier cas nous avons des constructions non-Généralisantes, dans le second la construction appartient au type généralisant. Nous nous sommes démarquée des recherches traditionnelles en prenant en compte la concession illocutoire : xotja sert à remettre en cause l’énoncé précédent pour une auto-Correction du locuteur qui annonce ainsi le changement du cours de sa pensée. Notre travail nous amène à la conclusion que la concession est un phénomène protéiforme non réductible à une notion de causalité inversée. L’élargissement du champ d’étude permet de jeter un pont entre la notion linguistique et la notion rhétorique de la concession et de donner un tableau plus complet des différentes formes de relation concessive en russe moderne. / In this thesis dedicated to concession in modern Russian we specified the concept by means of a prototypical schema which we applied to classify different types of concessive constructions. This schema aims at embracing the majority of sentences marked as concessive. The main mark of the proposed schema (p, C q), based on the idea of contrast between the implications of p and q contents, assessments of these contents or p and q speech acts, is the connective C, a concessive conjunction or preposition. We studied concessive relations in both complex sentences and simple sentences. They are classified according to the epistemic status of q and subdivided into non-Conditional, conditional and counterfactual. The second criterion of classification is the single or multiple status of q. According to it we have, on the one hand, non-Generalized concessive constructions and, on the other, generalized concessive constructions. Outstepping the traditional research, we made a point of studying illocutionary concession as part of the whole. Indeed, xotja in discourse is used by the speaker as a self-Correction technique in order to reject the previous utterance pointing thus the deviation of their thought. As a result of our research we come to the conclusion that concession has multiple forms and cannot be reduced to inoperant causality. Due to a wider research scope we managed to bridge the linguistic and rhetoric concessions and to give a broader view of different forms of concessive relations in modern Russian.