JSL Volume 18 No.2

Contents

Articles

John Frederick Bailyn
To What Degree Are Croatian and Serbian the Same Language? Evidence from a Translation Study     181

Barbara Citko
On the Distribution of -kolwiek ‘ever’ in Polish Free Relatives     221

Bartłomiej Czaplicki
Palatalized Labials in Polish Dialects: An Evolutionary Perspective     259

Charles Jones and James S. Levine
Conditions on the Formation of Middles in Russian     291

Reviews

Grant H. Lundberg
Tjaša Jakop. The Dual in Slovene Dialects     337

Krzysztof Migdalski
Franc Marušič and Rok Žaucer. Studies in Formal Slavic Linguistics     339

Article Abstracts

John Frederick Bailyn

To What Degree Are Croatian and Serbian the Same Language? Evidence from a Translation Study

Abstract: This article reports on the results of an experimental translation study conducted in 2008 in which 16 adult native speakers of the Croatian variant of Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS) were asked to translate nine texts from the Serbian BCS variant into their native Croatian variant in order to test the extent to which Croatian and Serbian do or do not employ distinct linguistic devices. The results show, on the basis of a statistical comparison of the purely grammatical building blocks in the original texts and their translations, that the Croatian and Serbian variants of BCS have essentially identical linguistic systems across all levels of language structure. In particular, we find that the phonological and syntactic systems are essentially identical and that over 98% of derivational and inflectional morphology tokens are identical Lexically, the open classes show a difference of less than 10% of tokens, whereas the closed grammatical classes show identity in over 95% of cases.

Barbara Citko

On the Distribution of -kolwiek ‘ever’ in Polish Free Relatives

Abstract: This paper analyzes the distribution of the particle -kolwiek 'ever' in Polish free relatives. The empirical observation it builds on concerns the obligatory presense of -kolwiek in complex free relatives. I argue against accounts that reduce this requirement to purely semantic considerations and propose a syntactic account instead. This account rests on independently motivated claims about the structure of Polish noun phrases and the positive setting of the DP Parameter for Polish. The crucial innovation lies in the structure proposed for wh-phrases in free relatives; I argue that such wh-phrases have a more complex internal structure than wh-phrases in questions, in that they require the topmost head inside the nominal projection, the Q head, to be filled by an overt element in order to support the maximality operator associated with the interpretation of free relatives.

Bartłomiej Czaplicki

Palatalized Labials in Polish Dialects: An Evolutionary Perspective

Abstract: Two types of explanations for typological asymmetries are in current use: synchronic, which rely on phonological filters that make learners more receptive to some patterns than others (e.g., markedness), and diachronic, which appeal to phonetically systematic errors that arise in the transmission of the speech signal. This paper provides a diachronic account of palatalized labials in standard and dialectal Polish. It is shown that the weak perceptibility of the palatal element in a specific phonetic context is a good predictor of depalatalization and that dissimilation arises whenever a phonetic signal can be interpreted in a non-unique manner. The Polish data exemplify three sources of natural sound change: (i) neutralization of perceptually weak contrasts, (ii) phonological reanalysis of ambiguous signals, and (iii) change in the frequency of phonetic variants. Sound change is shown to be non-deterministic and non-optimizing. There is no role for markedness in this account.

Charles Jones and James S. Levine

Conditions on the Formation of Middles in Russian

Abstract: This paper presents a VP account of the adverbial modification required, in some way, by the middle construction in Russian and the related construction in English: Kartoska pocistilas' legko 'The potato peeled easily,' The account develops a syntax and semantics for the adverbial middle (Type I: Ackema and Schoorlemmer 2006) that is free of various requirements often supposed for it, notably an "implicit agent" and generic interpretation. The main condition on adverbial middle formation is access to an embedded state predicate of the object in the logical structure of the head.