HSE Doctoral Student Awarded for Best PhD Presentation at 58th Societas Linguistica Europaea Conference
From August 26–29, 2025, the largest annual linguistics conference, Societas Linguistica Europaea, took place in Bordeaux, France. Doctoral students and researchers from HSE University took part in the event. The paper ‘Lability Drift in Modern Aramaic languages’ by Elena Shvedova was highly praised by the expert community and took first place among PhD student presentations. In an interview with the HSE News Service, Elena Shvedova spoke about her research and the conference itself.
The Research
The title of my talk was ‘Lability Drift in Modern Aramaic languages.’ I examined a specific linguistic phenomenon (labile verbs) in particular languages (modern Aramaic).
The Aramaic languages form a branch of the Semitic family, related to Hebrew and Arabic. One of their distinguishing features is their long tradition of written attestation. The earliest inscriptions in Aramaic date back to the ninth century BCE, and modern Aramaic languages are still spoken today. Of course, it is not just one language, but dozens, all descending from a common ancestor—Proto-Aramaic—and thus forming a single group. This long history of written records (almost 3,000 years) makes it possible to conduct diachronic studies of Aramaic, that is, to compare languages from different periods and trace how languages can change. In my research, I used data from both ancient Aramaic (now extinct) and modern Aramaic languages.
Modern (or Neo-Aramaic) languages are spoken by Christian, Jewish, Mandaean and, in one village, Muslim communities of the Middle East; many also live in diasporas worldwide.
There are several branches of Neo-Aramaic: Modern Western Aramaic and the Eastern Neo-Aramaic group, which includes North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic, Turoyo, and Neo-Mandaic. I was fortunate to work with speakers from different branches, and I am deeply grateful to everyone who shared their knowledge with me—this work would not have been possible without their help. My main focus is North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic, as my colleagues and I travel annually on fieldwork expeditions to Assyrian communities. Thanks to colleagues from the Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies in Moscow, I also managed to work with a speaker of Modern Western Aramaic, spoken in the Syrian village of Maaloula. Moreover, during one expedition to the Assyrian community in Armenia, I happened by chance to meet a speaker of Turoyo, who was in Armenia for just a few days. He kindly helped me translate several sentences into his language. The rest of my data I collected from dictionaries and grammars.
The Findings
Now let me explain what exactly I studied in Aramaic languages across different periods. Labile verbs are those that can be used both transitively and intransitively without any change in form. In simple terms, they may either take a direct object or not. The Russian language has relatively few such verbs, but, as described in the works of Alexander Letuchiy, there are examples such as ‘катить’ (to roll), ‘сыпать’ (to pour/sprinkle), and ‘лить’ (to pour). These are labile because one can say ‘лил дождь’ (‘it rained’—intransitive) or ‘он лил воду’ (‘he poured water’—transitive).
While Russian has only a handful of labile verbs, the phenomenon is far more widespread in Neo-Aramaic. The aim of my research was to describe how the number of labile verbs increased in Neo-Aramaic languages and to explain why this occurred. More detail can be found in the slides from my presentation.
The Writing Process
This research was part of my master’s dissertation, which I wrote between 2020 and 2022 at St Petersburg State University under the supervision of Sergey Say. Afterwards, I continued to collect new data and develop new explanations for the findings, but the foundation of my work was laid five years ago, thanks to Dr Say.
About the Conference
This was my first time taking part in the conference. In January 2025, participants had to submit abstracts of around 500 words. Anyone could do this, but you needed to become a member of Societas Linguistica Europaea for a year and pay a fee of about €10. Each submission was then reviewed by three anonymous referees, each giving a score on a five-point scale. The reviewing process was quite strict. Afterwards, the organisers set a passing threshold and informed participants of the results.
It is worth saying a few words about how the conference itself is structured. There are so-called general sessions and workshops. Workshops are thematic sessions with their own organisers, who apply in advance to hold them. All the presentations in such sessions are united by one common theme. This year, there was a separate workshop dedicated to labile verbs: researchers presented on this phenomenon using data from different languages. I wrote my abstract specifically for this workshop, because the organisers had contacted me in advance and invited me to submit. This was both unexpected and very encouraging. Nevertheless, abstracts for workshops still go through the same overall selection process and blind reviewing.
Where the Conference Took Place
It was held at the University of Bordeaux, with presentations running for four days from 9 am to 5:30 pm. Up to 15 parallel sessions were taking place at the same time, so one always had to miss something interesting. The scale of the conference was truly impressive: I do not know the exact number of talks, but the programme list alone ran to 22 pages. Each presentation was allotted 20 minutes, plus five minutes for questions. In addition, there were poster sessions where research was presented in the form of posters. Each day there were two coffee breaks and lunch, and in the evenings there were shared dinners and walks.
About the Award
I was given the award for the best doctoral student presentation, as judged by the programme committee. I should say that I heard many outstanding presentations by doctoral students at the conference, including my colleagues from HSE. That is why the award came as something of a surprise: I am sure that my colleagues deserved it just as much as I did.
Winning this prize gives the right to deliver a plenary talk at next year’s conference. It also comes with a €1,000 award, half of which goes towards travel expenses for the next conference. The 2026 SLE conference will take place in Osnabrück, Germany. I hope to be able to attend—it would be a great honour for me.
Future Plans
In the near future, I need to revise my candidate dissertation, pass the pre-defence, finish my doctoral programme, and then defend my thesis—if everything goes to plan. So most of my time at the moment is dedicated to that.
As for upcoming conferences, I would like to take part in the Conference on Typology and Grammar for Young Scholars, which has been held for many years at the Institute for Linguistic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg. Overall, I have many academic plans—including further linguistic fieldwork among Assyrian communities in Russia and Armenia, work on a contribution to the Typological Atlas of the Languages of Dagestan, writing articles based on my dissertation research, and exploring new areas of study. We will see which of these I manage to carry out.