Bashkir State University Dialogue on Financial Transactions

Project Director, Professor Sagit Shafikov, Head, English and Germanic Languages Bashkir State University

When is a gift a bribe? Talking About Corruption…. The purpose of this project is to conduct research on the linguistic and conceptual underpinning of graft, corruption, and official malfeasance. The project distinguishes between proper and improper forms of inter-personal exchange. The project hypothesizes that semantic structures for characterizing inter-personal exchanges such as goodwill reciprocation and favor-doing are sometimes extended to describe exchanges involving gifting, bribe-taking or bribe-solicitation, and graft. The project sponsors research on the psycholinguistic context of talk about corruption. The project sponsors a specialist research seminar in October 2003 in Ufa, Russia and a research program in the period May-December 2003. A follow-up seminar is scheduled to take place in March 2004. This project partners a linguist (Russian national) with a political scientist (US National) and forms a small research team for the purposes of joint publication. Research Objectives The project analyzes semantic structures of lexical units regarding graft in four languages, English, Kazakh, Russian, and Tatar. To this end, the research includes a complex analysis of the semantic field of graft aimed at establishing in-field and cross-field semantic relations of field constituents. The research also includes analysis of relations within semantic structures of polysemantic words denoting graft and structures of phraseological units related to this field. This analysis is undertaken against a broad background of socio-cultural and socio-ethnic concepts underlying the semantic field in each of the selected languages. The common and language-specific features of the etalon field of graft is expected to make a contribution both to semantics, linguistic typology, research into universals of language, on the one hand, and into sociology and political science in the perspective of promoting understanding and communication among cultures. Conduct of Research and Methodology The individual researchers will conduct research and will gather, along with other linguists and political or legal specialists from Kazakhstan and Russia for a seminar in 2003 at Ufa State University. Graduate students will be invited to participate in the two-day seminar. The researchers will present papers on the subject of “Talking about Corruption.” The purpose will be to analyze how different languages and different cultures conceptualize transactions that involve questionable transfers of benefit entailing self-interest. The linguistic insights generated in the research will be generalized to applicability in the sphere of politics and legal studies. The researchers will then revise their papers in light of the seminar discussions for publication by the university press at Ufa State University. This project is sponsored by the International Research Exchange Board with the support of the U.S. Department of State. Contact Sagit Shafikov sagit@rbcmail.ru Contact Gregory Gleason gleasong@unm.edu