JSL Volume 21 No.2

Contents

Articles

Laura Janda and Olga Lyashevskaya
Semantic Profiles of Five Russian Prefixes:
po-, s-, za-, na-, pro-     211

Lucija Šimičić, Peter Houtzagers, Anita Sujoldžić, and John Nerbonne
Diatopic Patterning of Croatian Varieties in the
Adriatic Region     259

Reviews

Boban Arsenijević Sabina Halupka-Rešetar.
Rečenični fokus u engleskom i
srpskom jeziku.     303

Stanka A. Fitneva Teodora Radeva-Bork.
Single and double clitics in adult and
child grammar     311

Vadim Kimmelman
Matthew Reeve. Clefts and their relatives     317

Egor Tsedryk John Frederick Bailyn.
The syntax of Russian     341

Article Abstracts

Laura Janda and Olga Lyashevskaya
Semantic Profiles of Five Russian Prefixes: po-, s-, za-, na-, pro-

Abstract: We test the hypothesis that Russian verbal prefixes express meaning even when they are used to create a “purely aspectual pair” (čistovidovaja para). This is contrary to traditional assumptions that prefixes in this function are semantically “empty.” We analyze the semantic tags independently established in the Russian National Corpus (www.ruscorpora.ru) for 382 perfective partner verbs with five of the most common verbal prefixes in Russian: po-, s-, za-, na-, and pro-. Statistical tests show that the relationship between prefixes and semantic tags is significant and robust, and further identify which relationships constitute attractions, repulsions, and neutral relation¬ships. It is possible to specify a unique meaning for each prefix in terms of the semantic tags it attracts or repulses. A detailed analysis of all the verbs in the study shows that the meanings of the prefixed perfective partners yield consistent patterns. Even verbs in repulsed semantic classes are consistent with these patterns. The meaning patterns of verbs with “purely aspectual” prefixes can be compared with the meanings of the prefixes as established on the basis of previous scholarship, which was primarily focused on the meanings of prefixes in their “non-empty” uses. This comparison shows that the verb meanings that appear with “purely perfectivizing” prefixes are the same as those found for “non-empty” uses of prefixes. We conclude that verbs select the prefix that is most compatible with their meanings when forming “purely aspectual” perfective partners, confirming our hypothesis.

Lucija Šimičić, Peter Houtzagers, Anita Sujoldžić, and John Nerbonne

Diatopic Patterning of Croatian Varieties in the Adriatic Region

Abstract: The calculation of aggregate linguistic distances can compensate for some of the drawbacks inherent to the isogloss bundling method used in traditional dialectology to identify dialect areas. Synchronic aggregate analysis can also point out differences with respect to a diachronically based classification of dialects. In this study the Levenshtein algorithm is applied for the first time to obtain an aggregate analysis of the linguistic distances among 88 diatopic varieties of Croatian spoken along the Eastern Adriatic coast and in the Italian province of Molise. We also measured lexical differences among these varieties, which are traditionally grouped into Čakavian, Štokavian, and transitional Čakavian-Štokavian varieties. The lexical and pronunciation distances are subsequently projected onto multidimensional cartographic representations. Both kinds of analyses confirm that linguistic discontinuity is characteristic of the whole region, and that discontinuities are more pronounced in the northern Adriatic area than in the south. We also show that the geographic lines are in many cases the most decisive factor contributing to linguistic cohesion, and that the internal heterogeneity within Čakavian is often greater than the differences between Čakavian and Štokavian varieties. This holds both for pronunciation and lexicon.