Talking Linguistics

The project is called 'Language as Reflected in People vs People as Reflected in Language', and is a result of a collaboration between two departments of the Pedagogical Institute, namely, the Department of English Language and Teaching Methodology, and the Faculty of Foreign Languages. It was made possible through an intra-university grant, and has been well-received in academic circles. The full presentation was given at a fringe meeting called 'Looking into the Future'. The sponsors for this event were MSLU's Centre for the Socio-Cognitive Study of Discourse, the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Linguistics, the Russian Association of Cognitive Linguists, and the Russian Science Foundation. The meeting was therefore replete with eminent linguists from those organisations, and also with academics from Tambov, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, and Belgorod, all studying cognitive linguistics as inspired by Professor Elena Kubryakova.
The project leader, Professor Natalia Besedina, presented the team's results in the Conference's plenary report. The team included Dr Svetlana Stepanenko, Dr Elena Stolyar, and Dr Olga Yarygina. They highlighted a few particular problems in identifying various aspects of human leadership in cognitive activity and the interpretive function of human consciousness as represented in language. They noted that cognitive language study has a great future, and that there were many new avenues of research where our linguists could take a leading role.