Dr Sarah Turner

(BA 1999, MSt 2001, DPhil 2006) studied at Oxford University and has held temporary teaching posts at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Chicago. In 2007 she became assistant professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Waterloo in Canada. She has taken a leave of absence in order to come to Bristol and participate in the project on the history of the French language in Russia.

Her main research interests are in the history of the Russian language. Her publications to date have focused on issues related to word order in diverse varieties of Russian, modern and pre-modern. They develop a pragmatic approach to the problem of word order variation, integrating observations about syntactic form with an examination of contextual and communicative factors that influence the organization of the clause.   

She also edits language and linguistics book reviews for Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des Slavistes.

Publications

Articles and chapters in books

• 'Post-verbal Subjects in Early East Slavonic', Transactions of the Philological Society, vol. 104, 2006, pp. 85-117.
• 'Methodological Issues in the Interpretation of Constituent Order in Early East Slavonic Sources', Russian Linguistics, vol. 31, 2007, pp. 113-35.
• 'Post-verbal Subject Pronouns in Russian: Control of the Floor and Narrative Point of View', Scando-Slavica, vol. 55, 2009, pp. 126-45.
• 'Russian as a VS Language', Canadian Slavonic Papers, vol. 51, 2009, pp. 525-46.
• 'Clause and Text Organization in Early East Slavic with Reference to Motion and Position Expressions', in New Approaches to Slavic Verbs of Motion, ed. Victoria Hasko and Renee Perelmutter, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010, pp. 15-45.

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