Dr Irina Nikolaeva

Lecturer in Language Documentation and Description

Irina Nikolaeva studied Finno-Ugric languages at Moscow State University and the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where she was awarded the Candidate degree in 1988. Her candidate dissertation explored the genetic relationship between the Uralic and Yukaghir languages. After graduation she worked as a research fellow in the Institute for Linguistics and a part-time lecturer in several universities in Russia and Hungary. She received further postgraduate training at the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. Her Ph.D. dissertation on the grammar of Udihe was defended at the University of Leiden in 1999. She then worked as a research associate at the Linguistics Departments of the University of Konstanz (2000–2004), the University of Oxford (2004–2006) and the University of Essex (2006–2007).

Irina's interests lie in the domain of syntax, morphology, typology, lexicalist theories of grammar, and the documentation of endangered languages. She has published several books on Uralic, Altaic and Palaeosiberian languages based on extensive fieldwork conducted in Siberia and the Northern part of European Russia (1986–present). They include dictionaries, descriptive grammars and text collections. Her theoretical research has mainly focused on the syntax-information structure interface, the structure of the noun phrase, relative clauses, mixed categories, the typology of agreement, and finiteness. She has also published on phonology and historical-comparative linguistics.

Selected publications

Recent Books

2007

(ed.) Finiteness: Theoretical and empirical foundations. Oxford: OUP.

2006

A historical dictionary of Yukaghir. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

2003

(with Elena Perekhvalskaya and Maria Tolskaya) Udeghe (Udihe) texts. Kyoto: Endangered Languages of the Pacific Rim Publications.

(with Vasilij Shalugin)Yukaghir-Russian and Russian-Yukaghir school dictionary. St. Petersburg: Drofa. [in Russian and Yukaghir]

On-line publications

2004

Online documentation of Kolyma Yukaghir (with Thomas Mayer).
http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/nikolaeva/documentation/index.html.

Recent articles

2007

Introduction. In I. Nikolaeva (ed.) Finiteness: Theoretical and empirical foundations. Oxford: OUP. 1–19.

"Constructional Economy and non-finite independent clauses." In I. Nikolaeva (ed.) Finiteness: Theoretical and empirical foundations. Oxford: OUP. 138–180

2006

(with Mary Dalrymple) "Syntax of natural and accidental coordination: Evidence from agreement." Language 82: 824–849.

2005

(with Mary Dalrymple) "Nonsubject agreement and discourse roles." Oxford University Working Papers in Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics 10: 73–94.

"Agreement and situation construal." In: M.M.Jocelyn Fernandez-Vest (ed.) The Uralic languages today. A linguistics and cognitive approach. Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, Editeur. 533–546.

"Modifier-Head Person Concord". In: G. Booij, E. Guevara, A. Ralli, S. Sgroi & Sergio Scalise (eds.) Morphology and Linguistic Typology. On-line Proceedings of the Fourth Mediterranean Morphology Meeting (MMM4) Catania, 21–23 September 2003. Università degli Studi di Bologna. 221–234. PDF

2003

"Possessive affixes as markers of information structuring: Evidence from Uralic." In: P Suihkonen and B. Comrie (eds.) International Symposium on Deictic Systems and Quantification in Languages spoken in Europe and North and Central Asia. Collection of papers. Izhevsk; Leipzig: Udmurt State University; Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology. 130–145.

"The structure of the Tundra Nenets noun phrase." In: M. Bakró-Nagy and K. Rédei (eds.) Ünnepi kötet Honti László tiszteletére. Budapest: MTA. 315–327.

For a more complete list of publications, see Dr Nikolaeva's CV.