On 4 February, the Department of English Language for Sciences Faculties in cooperation with the Department of General Linguistics and Stylistics, and the Communication Studies Centre held the eighth national research and practice conference with international participation “Comparative methods in linguistic studies. Interlinguistic and intralinguistic comparison”. The event was held online via Zoom. Among the participants of the conference were representatives from universities in Voronezh, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Samara, Saratov, Kursk, Borisoglebsk, Novosibirsk, Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan), Klagenfurt (Austria), and Dakar (Senegal).
This year, the conference was dedicated to the 50th anniversary of comparative studies held at Voronezh State University. At the beginning of the conference, the participants paid tribute to the deceased members of the Voronezh comparative school.
As Professor Marina Sternina mentioned in her report, the school of comparative studies in Voronezh was founded by Professor Zinaida Popova, DSc in Philology, Honoured Scientist of the Russian Federation. The first PhD thesis in the field of comparative studies was conducted by Zinaida Belkina in 1972 under the supervision of Zinaida Popova. It was dedicated to the analysis of the verbal lexical unit “davat” (to give) and its comparison with German and French equivalents.
Comparative studies in Voronezh have come a long way in the last fifty years. It started with the comparative semantic analysis of one Russian lexical unit. Now, it involves studying large lexical and semantic and thematic groups both in closely related and unrelated languages, contrastive studies of communication behaviour, large-scale intralinguistic comparisons, the development of fundamentally new types of dictionaries, identifying interlinguistic and intralinguistic gaps represented by different parts of speech, and creating a new comparative parameter method of linguistic research.
The participants of the conference made a new contribution to the development of comparative research: forty presentations were given during the plenary session and the three sections of the conference. They were dedicated to comparative semantic studies, comparative studies in psycholinguistics, comparative studies of national conceptual frameworks and communicative behaviour, comparative studies in grammar, phonetics, and text, and comparative studies and translation problems.
The conference has always been attended by young researchers who are taking their first steps in science. This year has been no exception: bachelor’s and master’s degree students from Voronezh and Novosibirsk presented the results of their research. Their works were highly praised by the participants of the conference.
The materials of the conference were published in the 19th issue of the scientific journal “Comparative research 2022”.
