dr. Elena Tribushinina - Humanities

dr. Elena Tribushinina
E.Tribushinina@uu.nl

Assistant Professor
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS - General

Gegenereerd op 2012-05-25 23:32:35

ProfileCVPublicationsResearchContact

Focus areas
Neuroscience & Cognition Utrecht

Involved in the following study programme(s)
Communicatie- en informatiewetenschappen
Communicatiestudies

Expertises
Adjective semantics - Bilingualism - Corpus linguistics - Adjectives in child language - First language acquisition (Dutch, Russian)

European project on "Pre- and Protomorphology"

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Curriculum vitae

Personal information
Tribushinina, Elena
Born September 4, 1979, Kemerovo, Russia
Married, one son

Education
2008    University of Leiden, Ph.D. (Cum Laude). Dissertation title: Cognitive Reference
           Points, supervisors: prof. dr. Arie Verhagen, prof. dr. Theo Janssen
2006    Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, M.Phil. (Cum Laude). Specialization: Linguistics
2000    Kemerovo State University (Russia), M.A. (Cum Laude).
           Specialization: English Language and Literature

Academic employment
2011-present     Guest fellow, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Department of
                        Linguistics and Communication Research
2010 - present   Assistant professor, Department of Dutch Language and Culture,
                        Utrecht Institute of Linguistics, Utrecht University
2010                 Postdoctoral researcher (project: Language Re-Organization Following
                        Cerebral Hemispherectomy, PIs: Sergey Avrutin and Stella de
                        Bode), Utrecht Institute of Linguistics
2009-2010         Postdoctoral researcher, Computational Linguistics and
                        Psycholinguistics Research Centre, University of Antwerp
2008-2009         Lecturer of Discourse Studies, Department of Dutch Language
                        and Culture, Utrecht University
2006-2008         Ph.D. student, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics
2000-2004         Lecturer of English and Dutch, Faculty of Romance and Germanic
                        Languages, Kemerovo State University (Russia)

Fellowships and awards
2011    EU-grant (Marie Curie IRSES) for the project Discourse Coherence in Bilingualism and
           SLI (partner institutions: ZAS Berlin, Herzen State Pedagogical University of
           Russia)
2009    NWO Veni Grant for the project The Emergence of Scales: Acquisition of Relative
           Adjectives in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective
2009    NWO Rubicon Grant for the project Relative Adjectives in Dutch Child Language
2005    Nederlandse Taalunie Scholarship for Young Academics
2004    Huygens grant, NUFFIC
2002    EU Tempus scholarship for a research stay at the University of Antwerp
1998    Russian Presidential Grant for talented young academics

Conferences and activities organized (selection)
2012    Conceptual Salience and Early Child Morphology, February 11-12, 2012, Vienna
2011    Experimental Methods in Language Acquisition Research VII
2010    WAP Symposium Language Acquisition and Society, Amsterdam
2010    Anéla Conference Cognitive Approaches to Applied Linguistics, Utrech
2009    WAP Panel Discussion Language Delays and Special Needs Pupils, Amsterdam
2008    Dutch-Flemish Days of Cognitive Linguistics, Leiden
2008    Sixth Semantics in the Netherlands Day, Leiden

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Key publications

All publications

Tribushinina, E. & Gillis, S. (2012). The acquisition of scalar structures: Production of adjectives and degree markers by Dutch-speaking children and their caregivers. Linguistics, 50(2), 241-268.

Tribushinina, E. (2011). Boundedness and relativity: A contrastive study of English and Russian. Languages in contrast, 11(1), 106-128.

Tribushinina, E. (2011). Once again on norms and comparison classes. Linguistics, 49(3), 525-553.

Tribushinina, E. & Janssen, T. (2011). Re-conceptualizing scale boundaries: The case of Dutch helemaal. Journal of pragmatics, 43(7), 2043-2056.

Tribushinina, E. (2011). Cognitive reference points in adjective-noun conceptual integration networks. In S. Handl & H.J. Schmid (Eds.), Windows to the Mind: Metaphor, Metonymy, Conceptual Blending (pp. 269-290). Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton.

Tribushinina, E. (2011). Conceptual motivation in adjectival semantics: Cognitive reference points revisited. In K.-U. Panther & G. Radden (Eds.), Motivation in Grammar and the Lexicon (Human Cognitive Processing, 27) (pp. 215-232). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Tribushinina, E. (2011). Piecemeal acquisition of boundedness: Degree modifiers of adjectives in Dutch child language. In G Bochner, P. De Brabanter, M. Kissine & D. Rossi (Eds.), Cognitive and Empirical Pragmatics: Issues and Perspectives (Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 25) (pp. 93-116). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Rakhilina, E. & Tribushinina, E. (2010). The Russian instrumental-of-comparison: constructional approach. In M. Grygiel & L.A. Janda (Eds.), Slavic Linguistics in a Cognitive Framework (pp. 145-174). Frankfurt/New York: Peter Lang.

Tribushinina, E. (2010). Vantages on scales: A study of Russian dimensional adjectives. Language sciences, 32, 241-258.

Tribushinina, E. (2010). The cognitive status of the norm. In G.I. Lushnikova, L.P. Prokhorova, S.V. Omelichkina, E.N. Ermolaeva, N.S. Sokolova & E.Ju. Mokrushina (Eds.), Concept and culture (pp. 494-500). Kemerovo: Kemerovo University Press.

Tribushinina, E. (2009). Reference points in linguistic construal: Scalar adjectives revisited. Studia linguistica, 63(2), 233-260.

Tribushinina, E. (2009). The linguistics of zero: A cognitive reference point or a phantom? Folia linguistica, 43(2), 417-461.

Tribushinina, E. (2009). On prototypicality of dimensional adjectives. In J. Zlatev, M. Andrén, M. Johansson Falck & C. Lundmark (Eds.), Studies in Language and Cognition (pp. 111-128). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Tribushinina, E. (2008). Cognitive Reference Points: Semantics Beyond the Prototypes in Adjectives of Space and Colour (LOT Dissertation Series, 192). Utrecht: LOT.

Tribushinina, E. (2008). Do small elephants exist?: Prototypicality effects in the acquisition of dimensional adjectives. Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen, 79(1), 31-41.

Tribushinina, E. (2008). EGO as a cognitive reference point: The case of nevysokij and nizkij. Russian linguistics, 32(3), 159-183.

Tribushinina, E. (2008). Neskol'ko aksiom o prilagatel'nyx-antonimax: kontrargumenty iz russkogo jazyka (Several axioms about antonymous adjectives: counterarguments from Russian). In P. Houtzagers, J. Kalsbeek & J. Schaeken (Eds.), Dutch Contributions to the Fourteenth International Congress of Slavists Vol. 34. Studies in Slavic and general linguistics (pp. 461-488). Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi.

Tribushinina, E. (2008). Scalarity and intersubjectivity. In M. Kluck & E.J. Smits (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth Semantics in the Netherlands Day (pp. 53-66). Groningen: University of Groningen.

Tribushinina, E. (2008). The development of scales in phylogeny and ontogeny: Path of subjectification. In G.I. Lushnikova & L.P. Prokhorova (Eds.), Concept and Culture (pp. 737-745). Kemerovo: Kuzbassvuzizdat.

Tribushinina, E. (2006). Is rond even rond in het Nederlands, Engels en Russisch? In E. Waegemans (Ed.), De taal van Peter de Grote: Russisch-Nederlandse contacten en contrasten (pp. 87-106). Leuven: ACCO.

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Research

Discourse Coherence in Bilingualism and SLI
01.01.2012 to 31.12.2015
General project description:
Due to the growth of migration, bilingualism in Europe is increasing considerably. Russian speakers constitute a significant proportion of these immigrants. Indeed, Russian is the most frequent minority language in Germany with more than 2 million speakers. Parallel to the growing bilingualism, children show increasing problems in language development. Professionals working with children lack clinical assessment tools for an early recognition of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in bilingual children and often confuse the effects of bilingualism and SLI. The increasing needs for efficient intervention compel researchers to provide scientifically valid tools for clinical treatments.

Current clinical diagnostic tools are mainly based on testing bilingual morphosyntactic phenomena, with much less attention paid to disentangling SLI and bilingualism. The studies on bilingualism and SLI also pay only little attention to the domain of discourse coherence, even though discourse competence is a key property of successful communication. Our project aims to fill the gap by providing insights into combined and separate effects of bilingualism and SLI in the domain of referential and relational discourse coherence. To this end, we collect and analyze comprehension and production data from bilingual children and compare them to monolingual children with and without SLI. The target population are native speakers of Russian acquiring Dutch or German either from birth (simultaneous bilinguals, 2L1) or from around age 3 on (consecutive bilinguals, L2).

This project is supported by the EU grant (Marie Curie IRSES) and is carried out in cooperation with Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (Berlin) and Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia (Saint-Petersburg).
Role: Project Leader
Funding: EU grant: Marie Curie International Research Staff Exchange Scheme (IRSES)
Project members UU/Humanities:

prof. dr. Sergey Avrutin

dr. Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul

dr. Pim Mak

prof. dr. Ted Sanders

dr. Elena Tribushinina

Dr. Rosie van Veen

The emergence of scales
01.12.2010 to 30.11.2014
General project description:
Linguistics witnesses a growing interest in gradable adjectives in general and relative adjectives (e.g. big, good, warm) in particular. Recent studies show that scales evoked by relative adjectives have a language-specific, functionally relevant structure. For instance, relative adjectives in Dutch evoke open scales and are therefore incompatible with maximizers (e.g. #helemaal láng ‘completely long’). In contrast, Russian relative adjectives evoke half-closed scales and may therefore be combined with sovsem ‘com-pletely/entirely’.

This project focuses on three aspects in the development of relative scales in Dutch and Russian child language: external structure (open vs. closed scales), internal structure (e.g. large-medium-small) and scale adjustment in argumentative contexts. Each of these structural aspects is investigated in terms of cognitive reference points (Tribushinina 2008a), i.e. salient parts of the scale anchoring the interpretation of relative adjectives.
Role: Project Leader
Funding: NWO grant: Veni grant
Project members UU/Humanities:

dr. Elena Tribushinina

Completed projects

Language reorganization after hemispherectomy
01.01.2010 to 31.12.2011
General project description:

Role: Researcher
Funding: Utrecht University: NCU research grant
Project members UU/Humanities:

prof. dr. Sergey Avrutin

dr. Elena Tribushinina

Relative adjectives in Dutch child language
01.07.2009 to 30.11.2010
General project description:
This project dealt with the acquisition of relative adjectives, such as ‘big’, ‘small’, ‘good’ and ‘warm’ by Dutch-speaking children. The focus was on the following three research questions:
1. When do Dutch-speaking children start using the category-specific norm in the interpretation of relative adjectives?
2. Is the ability to use the norm influenced by the ontological status and prototypicality of the described objects?
3. How is the knowledge of the linguistically relevant scale structure acquired?

Research questions 1 and 2 were investigated by means of two comprehension experiments based on a Scalar Judgment Task. In Experiment 1, I investigated whether adult interpretations of groot ‘big’ and klein ‘small’ are contingent on the ontological status and prototypicality of the described objects (Tribushinina, 2011). The results showed that scalar judgments of adults clearly depend on the object category under judgment. Adults are reluctant to call prototypically big entities such as elephants and planes groot and prototypically small entities such as mice and gnomes klein. The results also demonstrated that the adult subjects integrated two different reference points – one from the world knowledge and one from the perceptual context – when assigning size terms to objects.

Experiment 2 targeted children’s developing ability to interpret relative terms by dynamically combining two sources of information (world knowledge and perceptual cues). The selection of target objects was made on the basis of a longitudinal corpus study of spatial adjectives in Dutch child language. In total, 150 Dutch-speaking children between ages 2 and 7 (25 per age group) participated in the experiment. The results show that 2- and 3-year-old children use two distinct reference points at the extremes of the scale for interpreting groot and klein. Four-year-olds, like adults, use a common reference point in the mid-zone of a series so that half of the scale is dubbed groot and half klein. From age 5 onwards, children are capable of integrating a conceptual and a perceptual reference point. However, the judgments of 5-year-old subjects were not contingent on the ontological and/or prototypical status of the described entities. This capacity appears to emerge only around age 7 (Tribushinina, submitted).

Research question 3 was investigated by means of a corpus study (Tribushinina and Gillis, in press). The main finding is that although even 2-year-old children display some sensitivity to scalar structures, the development in this domain is more protracted than has been hitherto assumed. More precisely, even at age 6 children make errors by combining adjectives with degree adverbs of incompatible scalar types (e.g. helemaal ziek ‘completely ill’, een beetje piepklein ‘a bit small’). The patterns found in child speech were compared to those attested in adult language (Tribushinina 2011; Tribushinina and Janssen 2011).

This project has been carried out at the University of Antwerp, Computational Linguistics and Psycholinguistics Research Centre.
Role: Project Leader
Funding: NWO grant: NWO Rubicon grant
Project members UU/Humanities:

dr. Elena Tribushinina
External project members:

Prof. dr Steven Gillis

Gegenereerd op 2012-05-25 23:32:35

dr. E. Tribushinina

Contact details

E.Tribushinina@uu.nl

Gegenereerd op 2012-05-25 23:32:35

Last updated 09.05.2012

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