Nadezjda Zorikhina Nilsson Professor of Slavic Languages

About me

I am a professor of Slavic Languages, specializing in Modern Russian. Prior to my appointment at Stockholm University in 2014, I held a variety of teaching and/or research positions at Saint Petersburg’s (Leningrad’s) University, Institute for Linguistic Studies (Russian Academy of Sciences), the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) and the University of Gothenburg.

I received my master's degree in Russian language and literature and in Russian as foreign language at Saint Petersburg’s (Leningrad’s) University in 1982 and obtained a Ph.D. in Slavic languages in 1998 from the University of Gothenburg, where I was later promoted to associate professor (docent) in Slavic languages in 2005 and to full professor of Russian language and linguistics in 2012.

Professional activities

  • Editor of Slavica Gothoburgensia i (Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis) (2010 – 2014), - Gothenburg Slavic Studies (2009 – 2014), GUSLI 10 (2002).
  • Editor of Stockholm Slavic papers (2015 – ). 
  • Editor of three anthologies and the dictionary “Norstedts ryska ordbok”. 
  • Associate Editor of “Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics” (2017 – 2023).
  • Associate Editor of “Scando-Slavica”, an international cross-disciplinary journal for Slavic and Baltic linguistics, literature, culture, history and society.
  • Participant in three international research projects. See Research.
  • Board Member of the Swedish Association of Slavists (2007–2014).
  • Member of the Swedish and Scandinavian Associations of Slavists (2006 – ).
  • Member of the International Commission on Aspectology of the International Committee of Slavists (2008 – )

 

 

 

Since 1982 I have been almost continuously engaged in teaching different aspects of the Russian language at both universities and elsewhere at all levels (BA, MA and later PhD). At Stockholm University I teach the following courses:

At BA level:

  • Russian morphology and word formation;
  • Russian syntax;
  • Russian stylistics;
  • Russian non-fiction texts, extensive reading;
  • Old Church Slavonic and The History of Russian Language;
  • Linguistic analysis;
  • Academic Writing.

At MA and PhD level:

  • Contemporary Slavic Linguistic Theory, 7.5 ECTS credits;
  • Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies I - Slavic Languages, 7.5 ECTS credits;
  • Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies II – Russian, 7.5 ECTS credits;
  • Russian and Swedish Complex Sentences in Contrast, 7,5 ECTS credits;
  • The Evolution of the Russian Language, 7,5 ECTS credits;
  • Modern Russian Grammar: complicated cases in theory and practice, 7.5 ECTS credits;
  • The Language of Russian massmedia.

Supervisor of PhD students

2009 David Westerholm. Funciones del pasado en los sistemas verbales del español y del ruso (defence PhD, supervisor, University of Gothenburg).

2014   Morgan Nilsson. Vowel–Zero Alternations in Prepositions. A Corpus Based Comparative Study of Their Phonological Conditioning in Polish, Slovak and Czech (defence PhD, main supervisor, University of Gothenburg).

2025 Arthur Edgren. Nominala bisatser i ryskan - en korpusundersökning (eng. Complement clauses in Russian. A corpus study) (defence PhD, main supervisor, Stockholm university).

2026 Simone Mellquist. What Swedish Prepositional Constructions Reveal about Russian Converb Meaning: A Corpus-Based Study (defence PhD, supervisor, Umeå university).

In progress

2025 - Mariia Gvozdkova. External force constructions in Slavic languages. (Stockholm university).

                 

My principal research interests lie in the field of:

  • Russian lexical and grammatical semantics, and in particular, the verbal categories of tense, aspect and mood 
  • Contrastive linguistics
  • Corpus linguistics
  • Synchronic typology (Slavic languages)
  • Translation theory

Other fields of interest include Russian stylistics and rhetoric, cognitive linguistics, diachronic typology and practical lexicography.

Grammar of Modern Russian

My research primarily involves the modern Russian language and focuses in particular on the interplay between grammatical and lexical semantics. The principal theoretical-methodological approach of this research was first applied in my PhD dissertation (Glagoly položenija v prostranstve v sovremennom russkom jazyke, (Positional verbs in Modern Russian), in which the approach of the Moscow Semantic School to defining a lexical meaning is combined with the utterance functional analysis of the Saint Petersburg School.

The Russian verb and its forms and categories continue to be one of the key areas of my research, and thus a number of articles have been devoted to analysis of the aspectual forms and their meanings in imperative, apprehensive and taxis constructions.

Contrastive linguistics and grammatical typology

Contrastive studies between Swedish and Russian are a major focus of my research: Russian is viewed in the light of the Swedish language with the emphasis on syntax structures and differences in linguistic conceptualisation of the world.

I am especially interested in linguistic encoding of the temporal order of events that is expressed by constructions with temporal conjunctions in Swedish and Russian. Another topic that I have been researching is aspect in a number of Slavic languages.

Completed research projects

Norstedts ryska ordbok (Nordstedts Russian Dictionary). One of the most important events of recent years in bilingual Russian-Swedish lexicography and even in Russian-Swedish contrastive research has been the publication of  Nordstedts new Russian Dictionary (928 p.), the result of six years of cooperation (2000-2006) by a large international Swedish-Russian research group. This project was funded by the Swedish Institute and Norstedts. The dictionary is the first of its kind in twenty years and is based on the latest research in both Russian/Swedish lexicography and grammar. A new detailed semantic analysis and description of many parts of speech were undertaken, which concerns, inter alia, my description of all the Swedish prepositions included in this dictionary.

Typology of Taxis Constructions. An international project led by the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Linguistic Studies (St. Petersburg, 2005-2008) concluded with a collective monograph, where I was responsible for a contribution on "Taxis in Swedish".

Typology of Taxis Constructions in Slavic languages. An international project led by the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Linguistic Studies (St.Petersburg, 2008-2024) with participants from thirteen countries. I have written “Taxis in Russian” (230 p.) in collaboration with Adrian Barentsen. The book is published 2024. See Publications.

Current research

My recent research has focused on

  • Participles in Modern Russian: competition between different forms;
  • Emotional concepts in Russian and Swedish;
  • Re-translation studies (Astrid Lindgren, August Strindberg in translations to Russian)

 

Selected publications

1998   Глаголы положения в пространстве в современном русском языке ( семантика слова и высказывания).  Sv. Positionsverb i modern ryska. (Ordets och yttrandets semantik). Doktorsavhandling. Göteborg. S. 341.

2006  Norstedts ryska ordbok. Red. Ulla Birgegård & Elisabeth Marklund Sharapova.Stockholm: Norstedts Akademiska Förlag.  Norstedts ryska ordbok: rysk-svensk, svensk-rysk: [141.000 ord och fraser]. 

2012a  Peculiarities of expressing the Apprehensive in the Russian language” .The Russian Verb. A. Grønn (ed.). [= Oslo Studies in Language 4(1)], 53-70.

2012b  The negated imperative in Russian and other Slavic languages. Aspectual and  modal meanings. Folke  Josephson & Ingmar Söhrman (eds.). Diachronic Studies on Verb Typology.. [= Studies in Language Companion Series].  John Benjamins.

2016  Taxis in Swedish. Typology of Taxis Constructions. Ed. Viktor S. Xrakovskij [= LINCOM Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 58]. München: Lincom Europa, 2016, 277-349.

2018 Vid i posledovatel’naja povtorjaemost’ v predloženijach s sojuzami bystroj smeny situacij v sovremennom russkom jazyke: Aspect et procès succesifs en russe: conjonctions de changement rapide de la situation”. La relation temps/aspect: approches typologique et contrastive.  Ed. Tatiana Milliaressi, Villeneuve d’Ascq: Éditions du Conceil Scientifique de L’Université de Lille SHS, 165-172.

2019 Temporal Relations and Cognition: The Swedish Conjunction innan Russian Equivalents” Slavica antiqua et hodierna: En hyllningsskrift till Per Ambrosiani. Institutionen för slaviska och baltiska språk, finska, nederländska och tyska, Stockholms universitet, 2019, 127-139.

2020  Covid-19: katastrofa v jazykovom izmerenii raznych stran. Covid-19: A Disaster in the Linguistic Dimension of Different Countries. Nadezjda Zorikhina Nilsson (et al.). Quaestio Rossica 8 (4), 1369-1390.

2024 Barentsen, A & Zorixina-Nilsson, N. V. Taksis v russkom jazyke. Taksis v slavjanskix jazykax. Tipologiçeskij analiz. Tom 1. Moskva: Izdatel´skij Dom JASK, 2024, 23–253.   

2025 Zorixina-Nilsson, N. V., & Piperski, A. Conjunctions. In M. L. Greenberg (ed.), Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics Online. Brill.

https://doi.org/10.1163/2589-6229_ESLO_COM_032621

2026 Zorixina-Nilsson, N. V. & Barentsen, A. Gerunds, Constructions with. In M. L. Greenberg (ed.), Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics Online. Brill.

https://doi.org/10.1163/2589-6229_ESLO_COM_032615

For more publications se links. Publication list in DIVA.

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