[Jenling] Workshop 13.2.2026 LInguistic description Ukrainian

[Ruprecht von Waldenfels]

Dear all,

we are pleased to announce a small workshop on the linguistic 
description of Ukrainian and to welcome colleagues from Norway here in 
Jena. Both students and colleagues are cordially invited!

The workshop will take place on *13 February* at *Friedrich Schiller 
University Jena* (room t.b.d.) and will be held in *hybrid format*.  
More information will follow.

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      Programme

*10:00–11:00*
Laura Janda (UiT The Arctic University of Norway)
/Alternative construals of ‘many’: Russian много and Ukrainian багато/

*11:00–11:10*
Break

*11:10–12:10*
Tore Nesset (UiT The Arctic University of Norway)
/Writing a Ukrainian grammar: the challenge of prepositions/

*12:10–13:20*
Lunch break

*13:20–14:05*
Natalia Cheilytko (FSU Jena)
/Title to be announced/

*14:05–14:50*
Ruprecht von Waldenfels (FSU Jena) & Mariia Shvedova (FSU Jena / Kharkiv)
/Spatial prepositions in Ukrainian: variation and change/

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      Abstracts

*Laura Janda – Alternative construals of ‘many’: Russian много and 
Ukrainian багато*

We observe both singular and plural verb forms in combination with a 
quantified subject, as in Russian /много людей пришло / пришли/ and 
Ukrainian /багато людей прийшло / прийшли/. However, the frequency and 
diachronic profiles for the two languages differ: whereas plural is 
attested with Russian /много/ in only 5% of corpus examples and that 
distribution is stable over the past 200 years, in Ukrainian plural is 
found in 31% of examples and that number is growing over time. We apply 
a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis to a database of 
approximately 39,000 Russian examples and 28,000 Ukrainian examples to 
probe the effects of various factors on these distributions. We also 
consider the cognitive and linguistic motives for this so-called 
“syntactic singular” vs. “semantic plural” variation.

*Tore Nesset – Writing a Ukrainian grammar: the challenge of prepositions*

In this presentation, I will present and discuss a grammar of Ukrainian, 
which I am currently writing together with my colleague Yuliia Palii at 
the Arctic University of Norway, and which is designed for second 
language learners of Ukrainian. I will first discuss the outline of the 
grammar and the structure of the text. I then address two general 
challenges: (a) differences between norm and usage and (b) understudied 
topics in Ukrainian linguistics. In the final part of my talk, I offer a 
case study of the challenges posed by Ukrainian prepositions. These 
challenges inter alia concern homonymy vs. polysemy, variation of form, 
case government, and the relationship between simple and complex 
prepositions.

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Best regards,
*Ruprecht von Waldenfels*

*Prof. Dr. Ruprecht von Waldenfels
Professur für Slawische Sprachwissenschaft
Institut für Slawistik und Kaukasusstudien
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Ernst-Abbe-Platz 8
D-07743 Jena


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