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Russian meets Norwegian (completed)

The RuN project established an educational and research-oriented environment for graduate students and scholars working on the Russian language in contrast with Norwegian and English.

The letters "RuN". Red, blue and white colours. Logo.

About the project

Full project name: Where Russian meets Norwegian - languages at the interfaces

We believe that focus on contrastive linguistics and translation studies can bridge the gap between research and education in the field of advanced second language learning of Russian and Norwegian.

Results

Among the results of the project is the development of new BA/MA-courses, organization of three major international conferences, the publication of teaching material, research articles, MA/PhD-theses etc. Of particular interest is the development of the RuN Corpus, a parallel Norwegian-Russian-English corpus. The corpus provides a basis for our contrastive studies in teaching and research, including the study of grammatical phenomena such as tense, aspect, mood, information structure, (in)definiteness, bare nominals in Russian and Norwegian from the perspective of both native speakers and second language learners.

Financing

The RuN project (2008–2010) received funding from the Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Higher Education (now DIKU) through its Cooperation Programme with Russia. The project has also received funding from the Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo, and The Research Council of Norway.

Collaboration

Main collaborative partner was the Murmansk Humanities Institute.

The RuN Corpus

The RuN corpus is a parallel corpus consisting mostly of Norwegian and Russian texts, some of which are also available in English translations. The texts are aligned at the sentence level and have been tagged for grammatical information at the word level. As of the end of the RuN project in November 2010, the corpus contained approximately 2 million words in Norwegian, 2 million words in Russian and 900 000 words in English. The database is additionally extended to include texts also from Bulgarian, BCS (Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian), Polish, Italian and French.

 A number of English translations are included in the RuN corpus, but in some cases, access to translations in English, French or German can only be obtained through the Oslo Multilingual Corpus (OMC), developed at the University of Oslo. Both the RuN corpus and OMC use the Glossa interface developed by Lars Nygaard and maintained by the Text Laboratory at UiO.

If you are interested in using the corpus for research, please contact Atle Grønn (head of the RuN project).

RuN Interactive translation (RuN-it)

RuN-it is an interactive translation program – a database of parallel translations – developed by the RuN project. RuN-it is first and foremost designed for students who want to practice and improve their Russian.

RuN-it contains several texts from the RuN Corpus; small fragments from famous Norwegian novels by Ingvar Ambjørnsen, Jostein Gaarder, Erlend Loe,  Jan Wiese and others. In addition to the professional Russian translations of these novels from the RuN Corpus, we have added 7 independent native speaker translations. Both the Norwegian original and the Russian translations have been annotated with pedagogical comments in Norwegian and Russian by participants in the RuN project.

The interactive user can compare his or her own translations with the choices made by native speakers. In addition, the user has access to a list of common mistakes (for each sentence) typically made by advanced Norwegian students of Russian. The mistakes have been detected on the basis of a test group of 15-20 Norwegian students.
RuN-it is thus a useful tool for Norwegian students of Russian, but with its unique database of parallel translations from Norwegian into Russian, RuN-it will also be of great value for researchers in translation studies, second language learning, grammar, stylistics and contrastive linguistics.

Events

The Russian verb

May 27-30, 2010 St. Petersburg, Russia.

Organised by the RuN project at the University of Oslo and financed by the Research Council of Norway.

The conference gathers leading representatives of mainstream linguistic approaches to the syntax-semantics interface and the pragmatics of TAM-categories. The focus is on modern Russian alone - or Russian in a contrastive/typological perspective.

Conference proceedings


A definiteness workshop

November 18-19, 2010 University of Oslo, Norway.

Organised by the RuN project and PROIEL - Pragmatic Resources in Indo-European Languages.

Computational, semantic and typological approaches to definiteness.

Participants

  • Klaus von Heusinger, Stuttgart - Specificity, Referentiality and Discourse Prominence
  • Albert Ortmann, Düsseldorf The relevance of semantic vs. pragmatic uniqueness in explaining definite article splits
  • Bert le Bruyn (with Henriëtte de Swart), Utrecht - Recoordinating bare coordination
  • Atle Grønn, Oslo Bare PPs – an empirical study of Norwegian
  • Maria Napoli, Pisa/Siena - To be or not to be definite. The evolution of articles in the history of Greek and Italian
  • Renata Briulotta, Palermo - The grammaticalization of definiteness in Homeric Greek
  • Angelika Müth, Oslo - Non-definiteness vs. specificity – The pragmatics of indefiniteness marking in Classical Armenian
  • Andrea L'Episcopo and Michele Longo, Palermo - Generic and definite interpretations from Latin to Italian
  •  Malvina Nissim, Bologna - Definite Genitives: Predicting the Alternation
  • Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova, Saarbrücken - The Distribution and Function of Nominal Subjects with Explicit Determiners in Czech
  • Henk Zeevat, Amsterdam/Oslo (CAS) Constraints on Lexical NP Selection
  • Hanne Eckhoff and Dag Haug, Oslo - Personal names with articles – A quantitative approach
  • Evelina Leivada & Phoevos Panagiotidis, Cyprus - Interpretations of nominal ellipsis: Indefinite Argument Drop in Modern Greek
  • Christopher Lucas, London - The role of context (and its limits) in the interpretation of definite noun phrases
  • Arnim von Stechow, Tübingen/Konstanz: Anaphoric versus descriptive definiteness

Russian in Contrast

September 17-19, 2009, University of Oslo, Norway.

Semantics and pragmatics (formal and non-formal approaches) of Russian language in a comparative perspective.

Conference proceedings

Conference talks

 

Published Oct. 27, 2020 12:21 PM - Last modified June 8, 2023 10:05 AM

Contact

Head of project

Atle Grønn

Participants

  • Atle Grønn Universitetet i Oslo
  • Maria Filiouchkina Krave
  • Trond Nordenstam
  • Hanne Eckhoff
  • Galina Smirnova
  • Olga Innokentevna Janygina
  • Olga Jurevna Klonova
  • Tatyana Melentyeva
  • Boris Orekhov
  • Vladislav Dorokhin
  • Konstantin Anchin
  • Per Byrkjeland
  • Olga Dolzhykova
  • Tim Roos
  • Evgenyj Shaul'skij
  • Marina Mozharovskaya
Detailed list of participants