The first Eurasian Congress of Linguists was held in Moscow, bringing together scientists from more than 40 countries. Representatives of Russia, the USA, China, India, Finland, China, the Netherlands and Germany spoke at the forum in different sections.
The forum was initiated by the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences with the assistance of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation. The event was dedicated to the anniversary of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). The Congress Organising Committee is headed by the President of the RAS Gennady Krasnikov and the head of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation Valery Falkov. The organisers are the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow State Linguistic University, the Association of Teachers and Researchers in Fundamental and Applied Linguistics and the Centre for Modern Educational Technologies.
SCoDis was also well represented at the event. Alan Cenki, founder of the PolyMod Lab, gave a presentation on ‘How to perform actions with gestures: recurrent gestures and their relation to language’ at the plenary session. Olga Iriskhanova, Director of the SCoDis Centre, Vice-Rector for Science at MSLU, professor, spoke in the section on oral speech and multichannel communication with the report ‘Positioning from a polymodal point of view’.
The Center’s scientists – M.I.Kiose, A.V.Leontieva, O.V.Agafonova, A.A.Petrov – presented at the poster session their research: ‘Contact-establishing gestures and their cognitive-pragmatic potential in expository dialogue (in English)’.
A round table ‘Gesture Language as a Second Type of Natural Human Languages’ was held at MSLU with the participation of the Centre’s scientists, where presentations were made by Anastasia Bauer (University of Cologne), Sonja Gipper (University of Cologne), Jana Hosman (University of Cologne), Vadim Kimmelman (University of Bergen), Elizaveta Filimonova (Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences), Svetlana Burkova (Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences), Maria Kyuseva (University of Surrey), Lorenzo Guilherme (Federal University of Minas Gerais), Ksenia Kutovich (Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences), Sofia Shatokhina (Siberian Federal University), Ksenia Golubina (Moscow State Linguistic University), Emma Kumurzhi (Moscow State Linguistic University).
The organisers hope that such a large-scale scientific event uniting linguists will become a tradition.
