Olena Scherbakova
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Her research focuses on typology and language evolution. She uses comparative phylogenetic methods, Bayesian modeling, and causal inference to answer big-picture questions about large-scale typological patterns and language change. Her PhD dissertation will encompass three projects testing hypotheses about the changes in grammatical structures conditioned by linguistic factors and sociolinguistic environment on a global scale. The sociolinguistics seminar she has taught throughout four semesters incorporated the topic of language variation and gender. She will contribute to the sociolinguistic and quantitative aspects of the project.
Research Interests
Historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language evolution.
Unraveling the interactions between culture and language:
Does grammatical gender foster gender inequality and vice versa?
(Collaborative project, awarded a NetIAS Constructive Advanced Thinking grant, 2021-2024)
The human cognitive system interacts with the cultural environment. Within this interaction, the interplay between grammatical gender and sociocultural gender represents a societal challenge. The presence of grammatical gender (such as masculine and feminine) in language has an effect on how men and women are perceived by humans. Most studies compared languages with sex-based gender (such as masculine/feminine in Spanish) with languages that do not have a grammatical gender system (e.g., in English and Mandarin). However, other nominal classification systems such as noun classes (e.g., in Swahili) or classifiers (e.g., in Japanese) also categorize nouns of the lexicon into categories based on features such as animacy or shape. Furthermore, most languages considered in existing studies are Indo-European. Nevertheless, sex-based grammatical gender system are not restricted to this language family. For example, grammatical gender systems are also found in languages such as Mian (Ok family, Papua-New-Guinea).
We expand the data pool for testing the effect of nominal classification systems on gender parity. Information on grammatical gender and sociocultural gender is extracted from the data already gathered during the respective research of the project members. We then use quantitative methods to capture the multilevel interaction between the linguistic and the sociocultural variables.
Key Publications
Shcherbakova, O., Gast, V., Blasi, D. E., Skirgård, H., Gray, R. D., & Greenhill, S. J. (2023). A quantitative global test of the complexity trade-off hypothesis: The case of nominal and verbal grammatical marking. Linguistics Vanguard, 9(s1), 155-167.
Shcherbakova, O., Michaelis, S. M., Haynie, H. J., Passmore, S., Gast, V., Gray, R. D., Greenhill, S. J., Blasi, D. E. & Skirgård, H. (2023). Societies of strangers do not speak less complex languages. Science Advances, 9(33), eadf7704.
Roberts, S. G., Killin, A., Deb, A., Sheard, C., Greenhill, S. J., Sinnemäki, K., Segovia-Martín, J., Nölle, J., Berdicevskis, A., Humphreys-Balkwill, A., Little, H., Opie, C., Jacques, G., Bromham, L., Tinits, P., Ross, R. M., Lee, S., Gasser, E., Calladine, J., Spike, M., Mann, S. F., Shcherbakova, O., Singer, R., Zhang, S., Benítez-Burraco, A., Kliesch, C., Thomas-Colquhoun, E., Skirgard, H., Tamariz, M., Passmore, S., Pellard, T., & Jordan, F. (2020). "CHIELD: The causal hypotheses in evolutionary linguistics database". Journal of Language Evolution, 5(2), 101-120.
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