Research
My work starts from a simple premise: the smallest meaningful pieces of language (morphemes) are the real engines of grammar. I study how these morphemes combine, interact, and get interpreted, and how their behavior reveals the structure that links syntax, morphology, phonology, and meaning.
Much of my research uses under-investigated languages of the Caucasus and Eastern Anatolia to expose asymmetries that have not been uncovered yet, from mobile affixes and multiple exponence to mismatches between form and interpretation. These patterns speak to bigger questions such as how words are built, how morphological operations are constrained, and how speakers reconcile competing cues across modules.
I also work on formal models of writing systems and orthography, treating scripts as formal objects in their own right, comparable to linguistic grammars in having rules, constraints, and complexity profiles.
Morphology
Mobile morphology
To be added soon
Orthography
Featurality
To be added soon
Languages
Armenian
Armenian is often treated as a single standardized language, but it is better understood as an independent branch of Indo-European with dozens of small, historically dispersed varieties across the Middle East and the Caucasus. These varieties differ in phonology, morphology, and syntax to degrees that range from partial to near total mutual intelligibility, and together they form a rich laboratory for studying how grammatical systems diverge. I treat this material as an empirical resource because it preserves contrasts and structural options that the standard language necessarily reduces to a single choice. Much of my graduate research used these dialects to investigate nominal and verbal morphology, work that later developed into several peer reviewed publications.
The Noun
Bezrukov, Nikita. 2016. Number marking mismatches in Modern Armenian: A Distributed Morphology approach. University of Chicago MA thesis. https://doi.org/10.31237/osf.io/5zx7k_v1
Bezrukov, Nikita. 2021. Морфологическое выражение числа в притяжательных формах современного армянского языка: постановка вопроса и теоретическое описание [Possessive plural marking in Eastern Armenian: Setting the research question and a theoretical description, in Russian]. Армянский гуманитарный вестник, 7, 5–63. https://doi.org/10.17613/m63y6-pht27
Bezrukov, Nikita. 2026. Segmentability and Reanalysis in Inflectional Learning: Evidence from Armenian Dialects. In Prep.
The Verb
Bezrukov, Nikita & Hossep Dolatian. 2020. Mobile Affixes Across Western Armenian: Conflicts Across Modules. Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Penn Linguistics Conference, vol. 26. https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/45284
Bezrukov, Nikita. 2022. Caucasus in Motion: Dynamic Wordhood and Morpheme Positioning in Armenian and Beyond. University of Pennsylvania PhD thesis. https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/31744
Ugaritic
Ugaritic occupies a key intermediate position in Central Semitic. It shares core morphological and lexical traits with the Canaanite languages such as Hebrew and Phoenician, while also aligning with the broader Central Semitic group that includes Arabic. This makes it an important data point for reconstructing the development of nominal morphology in Semitic. My work focuses on Ugaritic nominal inflection, especially what it reveals about the underlying order of inflectional morphemes in Central Semitic. Its consonantal cuneiform script is also of interest in its own right. Although structurally consonantal, it occasionally represents vowels in environments conditioned by an underlying glottal stop, which provides a useful case for how consonantal writing systems encode segmental structure.
The Noun
Bezrukov, Nikita. 2026. Fine-Grained Segmentation of Northwest Semitic Noun Inflection. In Prep.