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Shamil Khairov (Glasgow University)

Abstract

What is a polithematic dictionary? How to dissect real life in a dictionary 'for all occasions'? What is 'a communicative fragment' and why is it so important when learning a foreign language? These are the main questions discussed in the lecture.

Admitting that for effective communication one should possess a repertoire of ready-to-use collocations and phrases the authors found a theoretical support in Boris Gasparov's concept of 'communicative fragment' - a linguistic unit which speakers are able to reproduce spontaneously as part of the process of language production, and which at the same time, can undergo an infinite variety of modifications and fusions.

The second part discusses treating expressivity and contractions like мухосранск or старпёры (старые пердуны) in Russian for All Occasions.

The ways the dictionary can be used in class, in independent language learning or in translation practices are considered in the conclusion

Biografie

Dr Shamil Khairov is Slavist by training (Ph.D. from St. Petersburg State University) and has taught Russian, Polish and Slovak languages in Britain, Ireland, Slovakia and other parts of Europe. He also speaks Bulgarian, Czech, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Slovene.

From 2005 he works as lecturer in Russian at the University of Glasgow. He is a designer and convener of the Russian for Social Scientists postgraduate programme. Shamil Khairov is a co-author (with J. Dunn) of Modern Russian Grammar (Routledge, 2009) and Russian For All Occasions. A Russian-English Dictionary of Collocations and Expressions (Routledge, 2019). His other publications deal with Slavonic lexicography, phraseology, and inter-cultural reception of different strata of Slavonic languages.

One of his most popular courses for undergraduate students is Russian 20^th Century Visual Culture: he delivered it as guest lecturer, partly or in full, in several European universities.

Shamil Khairov is a keen black-and-white photographer and has had solo exhibitions in Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Belgium, Scotland and Russia.

Christian Voss (Humboldt University, Berlin)

Abstract

The lecture discusses the cultural contribution of the Albanian-speaking population in Tito’s Yugoslavia under the condition of its highly contradictory political treatment, oscillating between repression and discrimination in the periods 1944-1961 and 1981-1998, and overt promotion between 1966 and 1981. The biographies of “cultural defectors” like the poet Esad Mekuli, famous actors Behim Fehmiu and Faruk Begolli or sportsmen Fadil Vokrri clearly indicate that the riots in Kosovo in 1981 triggered the loss of Yugoslav loyalty among the Albanians. The limits of Yugoslav nation-building can also be shown in the representation of Albanians in Miroslav Krleža’s Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia, where Serbian nationalist intervention in 1981 insisted on the rewriting of the articles on Albania(ns) to reinstall the traditional hegemonic and paternalistic discourse.

Biografie

Christian Voss has been Head of the Department for South Slavic Studies at Humboldt University Berlin since 2006. He finished his PhD on Church Slavonic in 1996 and his habilitation on Slavic minorities in Greece in 2004 in Freiburg/Br. He has extensively published in the fields of sociolinguistics, contact linguistics and language policy in the Balkans. He is the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Center “Crossing Borders” in Berlin, editor of the series “Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe” and co-editor of several journals.