Artemii Kuznetsov

College:

Hertford College

Thesis Title:

Referential Structure in Japanese: Diachronic Study

Supervisor:

Biography:

I specialise in corpus-based approaches to the history of Japanese. My current research focuses on annotating diachronic corpora to track how speakers encode reference and information structure across more than a thousand years of Japanese texts. I work with large digital resources (including the Oxford–NINJAL corpus project), designing annotation schemes for referential density, information status, and discourse structure, and applying quantitative methods to model patterns of argument expression over time.

Before coming to Oxford, I held research positions in Japan and Russia that shaped my interest in combining theoretical linguistics with corpus development and typological comparison. In 2020–2021, I was a Special Joint Research Fellow at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL), working on the grammaticalisation of motion verbs in Japanese (academic host: Prof Yo Matsumoto) and on nominal causal constructions in Ryukyuan languages, including fieldwork in Okinawa. In 2021–2022, I was a Research Fellow at Kyoto University (Graduate School of Letters), focusing on Ryukyuan languages under the guidance of Prof Syuntaro Tida, and I served as Assistant Editor for Kyoto University Linguistic Research. In parallel (2020–2022), I worked remotely as a Research Assistant at the Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences (Saint Petersburg), contributing Japanese data to a project on the typology of causal constructions (PI: Prof Sergey Say), and co-organising the annual Conference on Typology and Grammar for Young Scholars.

Alongside research, I teach Japanese and East Asian linguistics to undergraduate and postgraduate students at Oxford.

Educational Background:

2020 Master of Arts: General Linguistics Saint Petersburg State University - Saint Petersburg, Russia

· Exchange semester at Leipzig University, Department of General linguistics (Germany, 2019) · Thesis: Grammaticalization of motion verbs in Japanese (supervisor: Prof. Sergey Say)

2017 Bachelor of Arts: Japanese Philology Saint Petersburg State University - Saint Petersburg, Russia

· Exchange semester at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Department of Japanese Philology (Poland) (2014-2015) · Exchange student at Keio University, Letters Department (Japan, 2016)

Research interests

My research interests centre on the languages of East Asia, diachronic linguistics, linguistic typology, and grammaticalisation. I am particularly interested in corpus-based approaches to grammar and discourse, including annotation-driven quantitative analysis, and in the interface between grammatical structure, information organisation, and poetics.

In a more applied sense, I work on designing, annotating, and maintaining historical corpora as reusable research infrastructure. I am interested in how such resources can support theory-driven linguistics, and can also be leveraged for NLP, the digital humanities, and cross-linguistic comparison.

Recent publications

· Kuznetsov, A. (2025). Referential Density in Japanese: Diachronic Study. Japanese/Korean Linguistics, 31.

Kuznetsov, Artemii. (2022). Nominal causal constructions in Japanese. In: Say, Sergey, Natalia Logvinova, Elizaveta Zabelina, and Natalia Zaika (eds.). 2022–. NoCaCoDa: Typological database of nominal causal constructions. St. Petersburg: Institute for Linguistic Studies, RAS. (Data first published on December 1, 2022; last revised on February 1, 2023). (Available online at https://nocacoda.github.io/langpages/Japanese.html. Accessed on January 14, 2026.)

· Kuznetsov, A. (2022). Once Again on the Two -k(-)yer- in Old Japanese: Distribution, Semantics, Spelling. In Japanese Korean Linguistics. Vol. 29 ed. Kaoru Horie, Kimi Akita, Yusuke Kubota, David Y. Oshima, and Akira Utsugi. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 83-97.

· Kuznetsov, A. (2021). Grammatikalizatsiya konstruktsij s ventivom i andativom v yaponskom yazyke [Grammaticalization of constructions with andative and ventive verbs in Japanese]. In: Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. Trudy Instituta lingvisticheskih issledovanij RAN. 17 (2), 103-144.

· Kuznetsov, A. (2021). From perfect to modal past: distinguishing between two usages of the Old Japanese suffix -kyer-. In: 162nd LSJ Meeting Handbook. Tokyo: The Linguistic Society of Japan, 282-288.

· Kuznetsov, A. (2020). Grammaticalization of motion verbs in Japanese: iku and kuru revisited. In: 161st LSJ Meeting Handbook. Tokyo: The Linguistic Society of Japan, 223-229.