During my BA/MA studies I worked in a project headed by Tatiana Chernigovskaya (Saint Petersburg State University) and Kira Gor (University of Maryland). It aimed to study how Russian verb morphology is represented in the mental lexicon: how different forms are stored, produced and comprehended by different groups of speakers (adults and children, L2 learners, patients with language and cognitive deficits). I ran a couple of experiments and created a database of Russian verbs. Ten years later, I came back to study this topic using neurolinguistic methods (see the current projects).

A database of Russian verbs

The database is based on the Grammatical dictionary of Russian compiled by A.A. Zaliznyak (1987) and contains more than 27000 verbs. Please, feel free to use it — just give a reference to this webpage and to the dictionary and let me know if something interesting comes out or if you notice a mistake. Unfortunately, everything is only in Russian so far:

Some information already extracted from the database

The Russian verb system is very complex, and there are several approaches to dividing verbs into classes. According to the One Stem Morphology developed in Davidson et al. (1996), Jakobson (1948) and Townsend (1975), Russian has 11 to 13 verb classes (five of them are productive) and several so-called anomalous verbs. Firstly, the number of verbs in these classes was never calculated before. So I collected this and some other information about them from the database. Secondly, it is widely assumed that there is no correlation between verb classes and accent paradigms in Russian. I found out that in the absolute majority of cases, this is not true. These findings are summarized in the following manuscript:

Slioussar, N. (2012). Nekotorye svedenija o formoobrazovatel’nyx klassax russkix glagolov (in Russian, ‘Some information on Russian verb classes’). Ms., Utrecht institute of Linguistics OTS and Saint Petersburg State University. Download.

Together with experimental data, some of these findings were included in my MA thesis:

Slioussar, N. (2003). Psixolingvisticheskoe issledovanie struktury mental’nogo leksikona na materiale russkix glagolov (in Russian, ‘Psycholinguistic study of the mental lexicon structure on the material of Russian verbs’). MA thesis, Saint Petersburg State University. Download.
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