Translation. Region: Russian Federal
Source: Novosibirsk State University –
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Graduate Humanitarian Institute of NSU (Fundamental and Applied Linguistics) Ekaterina Kulyatina studied how the living conversational speech of the intelligentsia of the Novosibirsk Akademgorodok is structured. Her work expands the possibilities for research in the field of stylistics and genre theory, and also opens up prospects for teaching neural networks to understand the subtleties of human speech.
In the project, Ekaterina analyzed the recordings of memories of residents of Akademgorodok, paying special attention to the so-called modus – the subjective “superstructure” of the statement.
— If I say: it is raining — it is simply a fact. And if I say: it seems to be raining — I add doubt. That is the modus. There are many such semantic superstructures in the Russian language, and they can overlap, — Ekaterina explained.
The work is written within the framework of the structural-semantic approach, the founder of which is considered to be Viktor Vladimirovich Vinogradov. Within the framework of modern syntactic concepts, which Ekaterina Kulyatina relied on in her research (the theory of modeling elementary simple sentences, developed by Maya Ivanovna Cheremisina), the contradictions contained in V. V. Vinogradov's approach are overcome. Nevertheless, the structural-semantic approach allows solving a wide range of scientific problems. As Ekaterina Kulyatina explained, the dictum part of speech constructions is now very well described, many works on this topic have been published, but the modus component, which she emphasized in her work, has not yet been studied so well.
The student took the recordings for analysis from the project "Myths and Legends of Akademgorodok" and supplemented them with her own interviews. The sample consisted of interviews with ten respondents – people with a high level of proficiency in Russian, many of whom were engaged in scientific research work.
— In their speech, we saw a high density of meanings: complex phrases, participial and adverbial constructions. Such features make oral speech rich, but at the same time difficult to analyze — especially automatically, — noted Ekaterina.
According to the author of the project, understanding the mode is important not only for philology, but also for technology. In the future, such developments can be used in training neural networks so that they understand and convey not only facts, but also subjective shades of meaning.
“We are not yet at the stage where a computer can fully recognize and reproduce such nuances, but this is a logical next step,” she noted.
The results achieved within the framework of Ekaterina Kulyatina's diploma work may be useful for research in the field of stylistics and genre theory.
— We have outlined a methodology for describing the genre of memoirs from the point of view of structural and semantic features. This is useful both for stylistics and for teaching, — Ekaterina emphasized.
The graduate herself plans to slightly change the direction of her research during her master's studies, focusing on the automation of speech analysis.
"I want to try to teach the computer to extract modal meanings and compare the machine results with my manual ones. This will be an honest test of how technologically ready we are for such an analysis," Ekaterina concluded.
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