Alona Kononenko-Szoszkiewicz

🎓 I am a Ukrainian linguist specializing in phonetics, phonology, more specifically phonotactics of Slavic and Germanic languages, i.e., a study of rules and patterns governing permissible combinations of sounds in a particular language. In my research, I employ corpus linguistic methods and natural language processing (Python).

👶 My interests also extend to the field of child language acquisition and sociolinguistics.

🌐 At the moment, I am actively involved research dedicated to (mor)phonotactics and enhancing the Net Auditory Distance Calculator- a tool developed at the Faculty of English to calculate cluster preferences of various languages.

💼 In my free time, I am a freelance translator and interpreter of Ukrainian, English, Polish, and Russian and a passionate mountaineer 🏔️.

news

Jan 20, 2024	📅 Can’t wait for my participation in the Pre- and Protomorphology workshop held at the University of Vienna from 8 to 9th February!
Nov 30, 2023	🚀 Thrilled to announce my grant application titled “Building bridges in Polish classrooms: The Ukrainian integration experience in Greater Poland.” submitted to the Independent Social Research Foundation.
Oct 30, 2023	🤞 Keeping fingers crossed

selected publications

IJL

(Mor)phonotactics of Ukrainian: The Study of Word-Initial Consonant Clusters

A. Kononenko-Szoszkiewicz

Italian Journal of Linguistics, 2023

Abs HTML

The present paper aims to provide the first analysis of Ukrainian phonotactics and morphonotactics, compare them qualitatively and quantitatively, and explain the difference between these two perspectives. Further, the paper explores the morphological complexity of consonant clusters in the Ukrainian language. The research is limited to consonant clusters in word-initial position compared to earlier studies in other Slavic languages, namely Russian and Polish. With respect to markedness, two hypotheses were tested, suggesting that morphonotactic clusters are expected to be less preferred than phonotactic, and that cluster preferability is directly proportional to frequency. Additionally, there have been discussed predictions of clusters’ preferability derived from the Net Auditory Distance principle.