Laura Alexis Janda

Laura Alexis Janda is a Professor of Russian Linguistics at the UiT The Arctic University of Norway, where she has worked since 2008. She is a member of the CLEAR research group (Cognitive Linguistics: Empirical Approaches to Russian) and leads the THREAT-DEFUSER project funded by the Norwegian Research Council. Her academic profile spans Cognitive Linguistics, Construction Grammar, and Corpus Linguistics, with a focus on Russian, Slavic, and Sámi languages.

Education:

• PhD in Slavic Linguistics & Certificate in Teaching ESL, UCLA (1984)
• Visiting Fellowships at Princeton University and UNC Chapel Hill
• Training in Persian, Czech, and Russian methodologies

Research Interests: Janda’s work bridges constructional networks and grammatical profiling in Slavic languages, with emphasis on aspect, case semantics, numeral classifiers, and political discourse analysis. She explores how morphological units like Russian prefixes function as verb classifiers and investigates language change in Sámi and Russian contexts.

Publication Trends: Recent articles analyze ChatGPT’s grammatical interpretation, constructicon architecture, and ideological messaging in Putin’s speeches. Her research integrates quantitative methods and FAIR data principles to address both theoretical and pedagogical challenges.

Awards & Grants:

• 2021 Honorary Doctorate (University of Turku, Finland)
• 2018 Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters
• 2017 Open Data Champion (SPARC Europe)
• 2013-2015 Norwegian Research Council grant for 'Birds & Beasts: Shaping Events in Old Russian'
• 2007-2011 Norwegian Research Council grant for 'Exploring Emptiness: Russian Verbal Morphology and Cognitive Linguistics'

Collaborative Networks: Janda mentors international researchers and collaborates with linguists in Russia, Norway, and the U.S. She co-developed the Russian Constructicon and Construxercise! pedagogical tool, emphasizing interdisciplinary applications of linguistic theory.

Labs & Projects: She co-founded the Tromsø Construction Lab, advancing constructicon resources for Russian and Sámi languages. Her THREAT-DEFUSER project examines perceived threats in Russian and Norwegian political discourse.