First ever dissertation in interdisciplinary language studies presented at KFU

The Candidate of Science (PhD) dissertation by Yuliya Volskaya is titled ‘Specificity of lexico-grammatical categories of concreteness and abstractness in Russian: an experimental approach’; it was submitted under specialization 5.12.3 Interdisciplinary language studies, which is part of 5.12 Cognitive sciences.

This was the first such thesis defense in Russia since the new nomenclature of research specializations was approved in February 2021. Among the opponents were leading national experts in cognitive linguistics.

The participants noted the high level of the work – which is significantly better than is required of a PhD thesis.

Volskaya’s research supervisor, Chief Research Associate of the Laboratory of Text Analytics Valery Solovyov noted, “Kazan Federal University very effectively uses its right to independently award academic degrees. At the latest plenum of the Higher Attestation Commission held on December 21, 2023, it was noted that in terms of the number of dissertations defended in independent councils in 2022, KFU ranks 5th – after Moscow State University, St. Petersburg State University, as well as the First Moscow State Medical University and RUDN University. Moreover, KFU is only two defenses behind the latter, but at the same time it is ahead of such respected organizations as the Higher School of Economics and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology by more than two dozen defenses. This indicates, first of all, the great attention paid at KFU to the training of young scientists in graduate school, as well as the creation of comfortable conditions for thesis preparation at Kazan University.”