I recently got the opportunity to travel to Moscow to attend the XVI April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development at the National Research University – Higher School of Economics (HSE). This conference covered a wide variety of fields including Sociology, Geography, and Technology, and, on the last day of the conference, there was a seminar specifically for Linguistics PhD students. The aim of this seminar was to allow students from Russia and other countries to exchange ideas, and to introduce students from around the world to HSE.

At the seminar, there were presentations from 10 PhD students and these covered a variety of Linguistics topics including Grammar, Semantics, Sign Language, and Cognitive Linguistics. There were also some presentations on Corpus Linguistics: one which discussed semantic role labelling for the Russian language based on the Russian FrameBank, and another which discussed building a corpus of Soviet poetry. I found it interesting to see corpus analyses based on the Russian language, and it was also interesting to see the use of the ‘web as corpus’. This introduced me to tools that I haven’t used before, such as the Google N-Gram Viewer.

In the afternoon, I gave a presentation entitled The collocation hypothesis: Evidence from self-paced reading. This was the first time I had ever given a conference presentation and I was really pleased to have an audience that seemed interested in my work. The audience was composed of PhD students, some undergraduate students from the Linguistics Department at HSE, researchers from other fields who had presented at the conference on the previous days, as well as a few senior academics who gave me some really useful feedback.

The conference was held at the central building of HSE and, the day before the seminar, an MA student in Computational Linguistics kindly gave me a tour of the Linguistics Department. It was interesting to see that their classes are all seminar-based and I particularly liked the way they had a common room where all members of the department, including undergraduates, postgraduates, and lecturers, go between classes in order to socialise or do work. Here, I got the chance to speak to some undergraduates and postgraduates and I was shown some of the corpora that were compiled at that department, such as the Corpus of Modern Yiddish, the Bashkir Poetic Corpus, and the Russian Learner Corpus of Academic Writing. I was also told about a project called Tolstoy Digital, which involved making a corpus of Tolstoy’s works. It was interesting to hear about the unique problems that were faced when compiling this corpus. For instance, Tolstoy used an older orthography so this had to be translated to the modern form before the corpus could be tagged and parsed.

When speaking to members of the department, it was also interesting to discuss how some of their work links to some of the work carried out at CASS and the Linguistics Department at Lancaster University. For example, Elena Semino’s work on pain questionnaires seemed to link closely to an article written by members of HSE entitled Towards a typology of pain predicates (Reznikova et al. 2012). This article discusses the way in which the semantic domain of pain is largely composed of words borrowed from other semantic domains.

After showing me around the department, the MA student, Natalia, showed me around some of the main sights in central Moscow. I really appreciated this as I got to see some of Moscow from a local’s perspective as well as getting to visit some of the key sights that I was looking forward to seeing such as the Bolshoi Theatre. Whilst in Moscow, I also went to see Swan Lake at the Kremlin Theatre of Classical Russian Ballet. This was an amazing experience because I had always wanted to see a Russian ballet and, although I had already seen Swan Lake several times, this was definitely the best version I had ever seen. Overall I had a brilliant time in Moscow and I am really grateful for the Higher School of Economics for funding and organising the trip.