Linguistics

This volume presents an analysis of clause structure in Bulgarian, with special focus on several interrelated areas: complementizers and complementation, wh-movement constructions including a variety of relative and interrogative clauses, and the structure of the left periphery of the clause including topic, focus, and dislocation positions. The basic proposal consists of a partially nonconfigurational, V-initial S constituent, with functional projections above it; a broad array of facts about Bulgarian sentence structure are accounted for by movement of all wh-phrases to Comp and subjects and other material to a topic position above Comp and a focus position below it. Originally published in 1986, this book was one of the first works to approach Bulgarian syntax within a generative framework. As such it brought up a number of issues which have become perennial problems in Balkan and Slavic linguistics, in particular issues of multiple wh movement and the relation between wh _and Focus. By taking seriously the rule-governed nature of non-standard and informal spoken language, the book uncovered data not dealt with in traditional grammars, including theoretically important facts about resumptive pronouns and island constraints in colloquial deto relatives, clitic doubling, and correlations of intonation with syntactic structure. In addition to analyzing previously unstudied data, it cast new light on classic problems in Bulgarian grammar including the proper analysis of the infinitive-like da-construction. This influential and seminal work is now available in a corrected edition, with a new forward by the author.

Horace G. Lunt’s Concise Dictionary of Old Russian is a “bridge” dictionary spanning the lexical territory between Old Church Slavic and Modern Russian. For all its 40-plus years, it remains the best available short dictionary (some 5,500 entries) for providing access to some seven centuries of Russian literary production, including especially the standard texts that are read in courses covering the medieval period of the 11th-14th centuries. The Concise Dictionary of Old Russian is particularly strong in providing explications for words connected to Old and Middle Russian material and spiritual culture, especially ecclesiastical words, rhetorical terms, and items of foreign origin. Additionally, it is valuable for providing meanings for words that still exist in modern Russian but that have undergone significant semantic change or specialization. The lexical selection reflects years of Professor Lunt’s practical experience determining which words cause graduate students difficulty when reading texts in Old and Middle Russian. Oscar E. Swan’s updated version of the Lunt dictionary does more than take the 1970 work, originally reproduced as typed on an old-fashioned manual Russian typewriter, and reissue it in modern typography. His line-by-line editing corrects many inconsistencies and errors in the original, modernizes the Russian glosses (many of which were copied from 19th c. sources and had become obsolete), and improves on the system of cross-references and verb citation. Generous inflectional tables of Old Russian nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs are given in a supplement. In the age of the internet, Swan’s version of the Lunt dictionary is available not only here, in hard-copy, but also in an electronic version (at http://lektorek.org), lexically interactive with glossaries of Old Church Slavic and Modern Russian, as well as a constantly expanding library of normalized medieval Russian texts.

In this monograph the authors assert that Russian verbal prefixes always express meaning, even when they are used to form the perfective partners of aspectual pairs. The prefixes in verbs like написать/na-pisat' 'write' and сварить/s-varit' 'cook' have semantic purpose, even though the corresponding imperfective verbs писать/pisat' 'write' and варить/varit' 'cook' have the same lexical meanings. This suggests a new hypothesis, namely that the Russian verbal prefixes function as verb classifiers, parallel to numeral classifiers. The exposition is designed to be theory-neutral and accessible to both linguists and nonlinguists. The studies make use of quantitative research on corpus data and statistical models (chisquare, logistic regression, etc.), which are presented in a common-sense way that assumes no special expertise. A user-friendly interactive webpage at http://emptyprefixes.uit.no/book.htm houses links to the authors' database, plus additional data from the studies cited. This book narrates recent breakthroughs in research on Russian aspect and demonstrates a range of methodologies designed to probe the relationship between the meaning and distribution of linguistic forms. These methodologies are used to investigate the "empty" prefixes, alternating constructions, prefix variation, and aspectual triplets. Though these phenomena have long been known to exist, their extent and behavior have not been previously explored in detail. The authors propose that the verbal prefixes select verbs according to broad semantic traits, categorizing them the way numeral classifiers categorize nouns. The purpose of the prefixes is to convert amorphous states and activities into discrete events and to group verbs according to the types of events they express. In other words, Russian prefixes are in effect a verb classifier system similar to those proposed for Mandarin Chinese, Hindi-Urdu, and a number of Australian languages, and this hypothesis facilitates cross-linguistic comparisons. The description of Russian prefixes as a verb classifier system furthermore has pedagogical value since curricula may be redesigned to teach students the system according to its meaningful groupings rather than simply requiring them to memorize hundreds of combinations of prefixes with simplex verbs. In short, the proposal to recognize Russian prefixes as verb classifiers supports the community of people interested in Russian grammar to be better linguists, better instructors, and better learners.

Contains a selection of work by one of the most important Slavic linguists of the past thirty years, along with introductions to the individual sections by other eminent specialists. While the material is primarily Slavic, most of the articles treat it in such a way that the results are of at least as much interest to general linguists as to Slavists. The editors have made a special effort to make the articles user-friendly. All examples are transliterated and provided with word-by-word glosses as well as translations. Accessible to a new generation of specialists in linguistics or poetics, whether or not they know Slavic, the book contains a combined bibliography with updated entries, a list of publications by Catherine V. Chvany, and a detailed Index. This book includes a major new essay (never published before), "Deconstructing Agents and Subjects" (Chapter 7), which provides a succinct inventory of Russian impersonal sentences, along with theoretical problems these sentences raise for the Theta Criterion (one role per argument) or the Extended Projection Principle (every sentence must have a subject), and a novel pragmatic-semiotic explanation of the well-known affinities between agents and subjects, agents and speakers, speakers and subjects, subjects and topics, and how all these relate to nominative case and agreement.

Contents:
Foreword (Emily Klenin and Olga Yokoyama).

Part I: Syntax and Morphosyntax.
Introduction by Leonard H. Babby.
Chapters:
On Movement out of a Tensed S; The Role of Presuppositions in Russian Existentials;
When Byt' Means Have; Syntactically Derived Words in a Lexicalist Theory;
Markedness and a Modified A-over-A (with Evidence from Second Language Acquisition); Explain and Explain; Deconstructing Agents and Subjects.

Part II: Lexical Specification and Storage.
Introduction by Michael S. Flier.
Chapters:
On `Root' and `Structure-Preserving' -- Disposable Blades for Occam's Razor;
On `Definiteness in Bulgarian, English, and Russian;
Syntactic Accessibility and Lexical Storage: the Distribution of the Russian Infinitive Form moch' and Its Theoretical Implications;
A Continuum of Lexical Transitivity: Slightly-Transitive Verbs.

Part III: Modeling Grammatical Categories.
Introduction by Carol J. Neidle.
Chapters:
Hierarchies in the Russian Case System: for N-A-G-L-D-I, against N-G-D-A-I-L;
From Jakobson's Cube as Objet d'art to a New Model of the Grammatical Sign;
Substantive Universals and Multi-Level Markedness: Oppositions in Bulgarian and English Verb Morphology;
On Paradigm Geometry (with Katherine L. McCreight);
The Evolution of the Concept of Markedness from the Prague Circle to Generative Grammar.

Part IV: Linguistic Poetics and Narrative Structure.
Introduction by Daniel Rancour-Laferriere.
Chapters:
Tìffi's Poem `The Ship' (Korabl'); Stylistic Use of Affective Suffixes in Leskov;
The Role of Verbal Tense and Aspect in the Narration of `The Tale of Igor's Campaign';
Verbal Aspect, Discourse Saliency, and the So-called `Perfect of Result' in Modern Russian;
The Poetics of Truth in Solzhenitsyn's "Zakhar-Kalita" (Zakhar-The-Pouch).

An Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Early Indo-European languages is intended to supply the reader with what Oswald Szemerényi has termed the “basic equipment” for any in-depth study of Indo-European: namely, some knowledge of Gothic, Latin, Ancient Greek, Old Church Slavic, Sanskrit, and Hittite. The first chapter provides an introduction to synchronic and diachronic terminology and method as well as a basic outline of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European phonology and morphology, along with some basic syntax, such as the function of cases, tenses, and moods. Completing this chapter are exercises on comparative method and reconstruction, with answers to the exercises provided in the Key to the chapter. The following seven chapters present the phonological and morphological history of the changes (in their chronological sequence) from Proto-Indo-European into the earliest attested languages in the major Indo-European families: Gothic from the Germanic family; Latin from the Italic and later Romance families; Ancient Greek; Old Irish from the Celtic family; Old Church Slavic from the Slavic family; Sanskrit from the Indo-Iranian family; and Hittite from the Anatolian family of Indo-European languages. In each of these chapters the phonological and morphological history of each language is followed by a glossed and grammatically exegeted text in the language. The text is in turn accompanied by exercises on the language, with all answers given. The book presupposes minimal knowledge of linguistic theory, the bases of which are presented in the first chapter. The book is, however, intended for linguists as well as historians, anthropologists and others who, while not conversant with the data, may yet be interested in pursuing Indo-European studies. An underlying premise of the book is the belief that Indo-European studies have for some time remained a closed book for many gifted scholars—linguistic and otherwise—who, with an introduction to the subject, might be able to make their own contribution to the field. The book is envisioned not only as an undergraduate- or graduate-level university text, but also as a reference work for those scholars already participating in the discipline. Recommended for library collections at four-year colleges and research universities.