Mariia Gvozdkova PhD student

I am a doctoral student in Slavic linguistics, specializing in the syntax-semantics interface. My project sheds light on how speakers of Slavic languages talk about the effect of an uncontrolled force — for instance, fire engulfing a forest, water carrying a boat, or sunlight flooding a room. Slavic languages offer a range of grammatical choices to express such force effects. My work provides a selective description and comparison of transitive constructions that speakers use with different force types, whether fire, wind, pain, cold, fear, or light. The central goal of my research is to determine how the semantics of an uncontrolled force influences the choice of grammatical construction and its linguistic form.