JSL Volume 13 No.1

Contents

In Memorium Jordan Pencev     3

Articles

Klaus Abels
"Expletive Negation" in Russian: A Conspiracy Theory     5

James Lavine
The Morphosyntax of Polish and Ukrainian -no/-to     75

Grant Lundberg
Phonological Results of an Ancient Border Shift: Vocalic Merger in Northeastern Slovenia     119

Penka Stateva
On the Status of Parasitic Gaps in Bulgarian     137

Reviews

Kevin Hannan
Karol Dejna and Slawomir Gala. Atlas gwar polskich     157

Charles E. Townsend
Frantisek Vaclav Mares. Diachronische Phonologie des Ur- und Fruehslavischen     165

Article Abstracts

Klaus Abels

"Expletive Negation" in Russian: A Conspiracy Theory

Abstract: In this paper I provide a new analysis of so called "expletive negation" in Russian. Brown and Franks (1995) discovered that negation sometimes licenses the genitive of negation while being unable to license a particular class of negative concord items, ni- phrases like nikto 'nobody'. In the present paper I show that the assumption made in the literature according to which "expletive negation" lacks negative force or is semantically vacuous is not well grounded. "Expletive negation" is semantically real negation; it just occupies an unusually high clausal position. The asymmetry between the genitive of negation on the one hand and ni-phrases on the other hand is explained in terms of locality. The investigation yields a number of further results. Genitive of negation is structural Case and susceptible to Relativized Minimality. Ni-phrases are analyzed as polarity sensitive universal quantifiers, whose movement is constrained in ways typical of quantifier raising.

James Lavine

The Morphosyntax of Polish and Ukrainian -no/-to

Abstract: This paper provides a detailed description of the Polish and Ukrainian -no/-to+ accusative construction, with considerable attention paid to how the two constructions differ and to their relevance for current morphological and syntactic theory. It is argued that Polish and Ukrainian -no/-to differ with respect to where the word-final /-no/-to affix is generated in the narrow syntax. A wide range of seemingly unrelated syntactic properties follow from this single claim. In the case of Polish -no/-to, it is shown that the word-final affix is not voice-altering, but rather generated in the head of a higher Aux projection. A separationist view of Morphology is adopted in which the stem and affix are joined post -syntactically. Ukrainian -no/-to is a genuine passive. This construction is related more generally to a class of accusative-Case-marked unaccusatives. Here it is shown that a Tense projection impoverished for agreement (o-incomplete T) is a necessary (and surprising) condition for unaccusatives to appear with ACC-Case-marked complements.

Grant Lundberg

Phonological Results of an Ancient Border Shift: Vocalic Merger in Northeastern Slovenia

Abstract: The Slovene dialect area of Haloze, located to the southeast of Ptuj along the present Slovene-Croatian national boarder, is essentially part of the Pannonian Slovene dialect base, yet fieldwork documents an unexpected phonological development in Haloze that connects it to an ancient Kajkavian Croatian vocalic merger. At least two explanations for this development in the village dialects of Haloze seem possible. The vocalic mergers could be the result of relatively recent dialect contact in the area, or they could have resulted from an ancient border shift. The paper argues that both the linguistic and historical data indicated that the merger of the Common Slavic jat and jers in Haloze is an ancient development and took place during the tenth to the thirteenth century control of this area by Hungary and Croatia

Penka Stateva

On the Status of Parasitic Gaps in Bulgarian

Abstract: This paper examines the likely candidates for the Parasitic Gap (PG) construction in Bulgarian. Focusing on the properties of PGs known from previously studied languages, I conclude that there are no genuine PGs in Bulgarian. I also argue that without-clauses are irrelevant for the study of PGs. They involve a different mechanism for licensing a null element inside the clause.