2018
From the Editors 183
Articles
Gabrijela Buljan
The Croatian Suffix -stv(o): A Study of Meaning and Polysemy in Word Formation 185
Keith Langston
Prescriptive Accentual Norms Versus Usage in Croatian: An Acoustic Study of Standard Pronunciation 245
Olga Steriopolo
Morphosyntax of Gender in Russian Sex-Differentiable Nouns 307
Reviews
Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan
Ruselina Nicolova. Bulgarian grammar. 337
Article Abstracts
Gabrijela Buljan
Abstract: This paper reports the results of an exploratory semantic analysis of Croa- tian suffixations in -stv(o). The suffix builds nouns which denote qualities, professions, states, collectivities, etc., and most suffixations take different interpretations in dif- ferent contexts. Our aim is to identify the suffix’s most type-frequent and productive meanings as well as typical patterns of polysemy in -stv(o) derivatives and their main motivating mechanisms. Assuming a usage-based Cognitive Grammar stance and Barcelona’s (2011) gradient view of metonymy, we examine an extensive corpus of suf- fixations and propose low-level generalizations, i.e., symbolic schemas that are shown to be variably frequent and productive. Although no single superschema can capture the extreme semantic variability of -stv(o) derivatives, we identify various local pat- terns of polysemy, which are predominantly motivated by metonymy.
Keith Langston
Abstract: The divergence of actual spoken usage from the prescriptive Croatian accen- tual norm has been widely noted, but such observations are largely impressionistic. Relatively little acoustic data is available for the realization of lexical prosodic features specifically in Croatian, as opposed to other closely related varieties, and previous studies have focused mainly on measurements of isolated forms produced by “model” speakers, chosen specifically for their ability to reproduce the standard accentuation. The current study analyzes samples of connected speech taken from recordings of the program Govorimo hrvatski on Croatian Radio 1, comparing the results to those in pre- vious acoustic studies of Croatian or Serbian accentuation. The implications of these findings for the viability of the current prescriptive norm are considered within the Croatian sociolinguistic context.
Olga Steriopolo
Abstract: This paper investigates the morphosyntax of gender in Russian sex-differ- entiable nouns within the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993; Halle 1997; Marantz 1997), which, to the best of my knowledge, has not been studied before. Distributed Morphology differentiates between word formation from √ roots and from syntactic categories; this distinction enables us to analyze syntac- tic processes that happen within words. The paper argues that grammatical gender in sex-differentiable nouns can be determined from a combination of the declension class and the natural gender of the referent. Thus there is no need to posit grammati- cal gender features in the syntax of such nouns. This work is a revision and develop- ment of the earlier Distributed Gender Hypothesis (Steriopolo and Wiltschko 2010). This research will be of interest to Russian specialists, language typologists, and the- oretical linguists, as well as to anyone interested in the Russian language and gender.
From the Editors 1
In Memoriam Andrei Zalizniak 3
Articles
Wojciech Guz
Unintegration and Polyfunctionality in Polish co Relative Clauses 17
Hagen Pitsch
Bulgarian Moods 55
Inna Tolskaya
Polysemy of Verbal Prefixes in Russian 101
Reviews
Vrinda Chidambaram
Franc Lanko Marušič and Rok Žaucer, eds.
Formal studies in Slovenian syntax: In honor of Janez Orešnik. 143
Jacek Witkoś
Steven Franks. Syntax and Spell-Out in Slavic. 167
Article Abstracts
Wojciech Guz
Abstract: This paper discusses a colloquial variety of Polish relative clauses introduced by the uninflected relative marker co. Unlike previous accounts, the analysis concentrates on authentic spoken utterances marked by structural unintegration—a common feature of spontaneous spoken language. As is shown, co clauses in unplanned speech depart from the traditional perception of what function they perform and how they do it. The advantage of using corpus data is that they offer insight into a wider range of functions of co than previously reported. These functions include a weakly subordinating conjunction, a general discourse connective, and time- and place-reference conjunctions similar to English when and where. Additionally, some cases are ambig- uous as to which of these functions co serves. The basic relativizing use of co is also revised and its description is enriched by an analysis of co clauses in spontaneous speech, in which several unintegration features were observed. They are in general related to the loose syntactic relationship of the head NP to the co clause. Specific features of unintegration include (i) co clauses as complete clauses with no gaps, (ii) idiosyncrasy and context-dependency of interpretation, (iii) nonmatching case forms and lack of required resumptive pronouns, (iv) preposition ellipsis, (v) long-distance relationship between the head and co clause, (vi) ambiguity in the semantic contribution of co clauses and of the marker co itself, and (vii) lack of a clearly specified nominal head.
Hagen Pitsch
Abstract: This paper concerns Bulgarian da-constructions (daCs), phrasal structures that correspond to subjunctive or infinitival structures in other languages. In combining two theoretical contributions to the syntax and semantics of Bulgarian subjunctives, an attempt is made to reconsider the Bulgarian mood system, focussing on daCs. The crucial claim is that daCs mark the absence of the indicative being associated with the supposition of subject certainty (Siegel 2009). Accordingly, da is a semantically vacuous mood marker chosen when the indicative would cause a semantic failure. By adding Krapova’s (2001) distinction between [+T] and [-T] daCs, their correspondence to subjunctive or infinitival structures in other languages follows immediately.
Inna Tolskaya
Abstract: This paper proposes a scalar analysis of polysemy of Russian verbal prefixes. The lexical entry remains constant throughout all uses of a given pre x: it relates the event, denoted by the prefixed verb, to a scale. The specific kind of transition denoted by the prefix is the source of the similarities in meaning. The structure, into which the prefix is inserted, varies and determines the scale along which the event is measured out, which may be a path (with verbs of motion), a scale of change, or the temporal trace of the event. It is demonstrated that the semantic differences go hand in hand with structural differences and that the meaning of a prefix is predictable based on the event structure of the verb it attaches to. If the verb lexicalizes a scale of change, the prefix must measure out the result, mapping the event onto a scale, which is the complement of the result. If the verb contains conflated material and is incompatible with a result, the only available position is above aspect, where the superlexical pre x measures out the time of the event. A direct object may serve either as the resultee undergoing a change of state or as the measuring scale (as in the case of spatial and consumption verbs). Many verbs are flexible, and then the pre x may take on different meanings and the structure depends on whether the event is interpreted as involving a change of state or an unbounded activity.
2017
Special Issue
Silver Anniversary Issue
Edited by
Stephen M. Dickey, Laura A. Janda, Keith Langston, and Catherine Rudin
Introduction 169
Articles
Dagmar Divjak, Serge Sharo , and Tomaž Erjavec
Slavic Corpus and Computational Linguistics 171
Steven Franks
Slavic Generative Syntax 199
Mirjam Fried
Construction Grammar in the Service of Slavic Linguistics, and Vice Versa 241
Kira Gor
The Mental Lexicon of L2 Learners of Russian:
Phonology and Morphology in Lexical Storage and Access 277
Marc L. Greenberg, Krzysztof E. Borowski, Joseph Schallert, and Curt F. Woolhiser
Slavic Dialectology: A Survey of Research since 1989 303
Tania Ionin and Teodora Radeva-Bork
The State of the Art of First Language Acquisition Research on Slavic Languages 337
Laura A. Janda and Stephen M. Dickey
Cognitive Linguistics: A Neat Theory for Messy Data 367
Darya Kavitskaya
Some Recent Developments in Slavic Phonology 387
Keith Langston
Slavic Sociolinguistics in the Post-Iron Curtain World:
A Survey of Recent Research 415
Tore Nesset
When We Went Digital and Seven Other Stories about Slavic Historical Linguistics in the 21st Century 439
Irina A. Sekerina
Slavic Psycholinguistics in the 21st Century 463
Andrea D. Sims
Slavic Morphology: Recent Approaches to Classic Problems, Illustrated with Russian 489
Article Abstracts
Dagmar Divjak, Serge Sharo , and Tomaž Erjave
Abstract: In this paper we focus on corpus-linguistic studies that address theoretical questions and on computational linguistic work on corpus annotation that makes corpora useful for linguistic analysis. First we discuss why the corpus linguistic approach was discredited by generative linguists in the second half of the 20th century, how it made a comeback through advances in computing and was finally adopted by usage-based linguistics at the beginning of the 21st century. Then we move on to an overview of necessary and common annotation layers and the issues that are encountered when performing automatic annotation, with special emphasis on Slavic languages. Finally we survey the types of research requiring corpora that Slavic linguists are involved in worldwide, and the resources they have at their disposal.
Steven Franks
Abstract: This article discusses major research areas in Slavic generative syntax. It begins with a short survey of topics, identifying important literature and useful resources. It then examines selected areas in more detail, specifically: (i) multiple wh-movement, (ii) secondary predication and control, (iii) agreement and coordination, and (iv) nominal structure and phases. Finally, several domains of inquiry are singled out for future research.
Mirjam Fried
Abstract: This paper explores the connection between Slavic languages and the theoretical tenets of construction grammar, a cognitively and functionally oriented approach to linguistic analysis. The strengths of traditional Slavic linguistics consist particularly in its focus on diachronic concerns, lexical semantics, and on issues of morphology. Constructional analysis provides a rm theoretical grounding for these traditional areas and also draws attention to phenomena and issues that have been less prominently pursued by Slavic linguists. This concerns various kinds of syntactic patterning but also the domain of discourse organization and grammatical devices that serve speci c discourse functions, be it the nature of pragmatic particles, specific clausal structures, expressions of subjective epistemic stance, etc. Of interest is also the origin and evolution of such devices. This area has been generally left just about untouched in Slavic linguistics, yet it represents an enormous pool of interesting data and relates directly to theoretical questions that are presently in the forefront of general linguistic research. With respect to the evolutionary perspective, the present paper also comments on the role of pragmaticization and constructionalization and their manifestations in particular instances, including suggestions for how they can be conceptualized with the contribution of construction grammar.
Kira Gor
Abstract: This review discusses a number of recent studies focusing on the role of phonological and morphological structure in lexical access of Russian words by non- native speakers. This research suggests that late second language (L2) learners differ from native speakers of Russian in several ways: Lower-profciency L2 learners rely on unfaithful, or fuzzy, phonological representations of words, which are caused either by problems with encoding difficult phonological contrasts, such as hard and soft consonants, or by uncertainty about the phonological form and form-meaning mappings for low-frequency words. In processing morphologically complex inflected words, L2 learners rely on decomposition to access the lexical meaning through the stem and may ignore the information carried by the inflection. The reviewed findings have broader implications for the understanding of nonnative word recognition, and the role of L2 proficiency in lexical processing.
Marc L. Greenberg, Krzysztof E. Borowski, Joseph Schallert, and Curt F. Woolhiser
Abstract: The last 25 years in Slavic dialectology mark the period not only of JSL’s founding but also of major and multiple political, social, and economic reorganizations in predominantly Slavic-speaking states. During this period research institutions and their priorities and projects have both continued and changed; technological innovation has meant moving towards electronic dissemination, “digital humanities,” and innovative modes of presenting research data and findings. In some cases major works (e.g., dialect atlases) have advanced during this period. Moreover, a new generation of scholars has had greater opportunities for mobility and therefore exposure to a variety of linguistic frameworks and approaches, which has fostered cross-border collaboration in the eld. The present essay gives an overview of progress made on dialect projects both created institutionally and individually and including both traditional (book, article) and new digital means of dissemination.
Tania Ionin and Teodora Radeva-Bork
Abstract: This paper provides an overview of recent work on the first language acquisi- tion of Slavic languages. The focus is on those areas in which the most work has been done since the year 2000: referring expressions, nominal inflection, the verbal domain, and word order, with a brief mention of other topics, including the acquisition of phonology. Most of the studies reviewed here focus on typical monolingual first language development, but bilingual first language development is discussed where relevant.
Laura A. Janda and Stephen M. Dickey
Abstract: We outline some recent highlights in the application of cognitive linguistic theoretical and methodological approaches to the analysis of Slavic languages. A principal strength of cognitive linguistics is the way it focuses our attention on the continuous nature of linguistic phenomena. Rather than positing rigid categories and strict definitions, cognitive linguistics addresses the messy realities of language, facilitating the extraction of coherent patterns from the noise of human communication. We fol- low a thematic arrangement motivated by the types of variation we observe in language and the analyses proposed by Slavic linguists. These include variation across meaning and form, across modalities and genres, and across time and speakers.
Darya Kavitskaya
Abstract: This article presents an overview of the last two decades of research in synchronic Slavic theoretical phonology and the elds it interacts with, such as phonetics, morphology, and syntax. The overview is arranged around the properties of Slavic languages that prominently figure in the recent discussion of theoretical phonology. It concentrates on the specific phenomena in Slavic, such as vowel reduction, vowel/ zero alternations, stress and pitch accent, vowel coalescence, voicing assimilation, wordnal devoicing, and consonant clusters and syllabi cation, and on how these phenomena are relevant to phonological theory and Slavic linguistics.
Keith Langston
Abstract: This article provides a general overview of research in Slavic sociolinguistics after 1989, focusing particularly on the most recent work (2010–16). Trends in sociolinguistic research in the East, West, and South Slavic areas are discussed, and in the conclusion the article considers perspectives for future research.
Tore Nesset
Abstract: In this overview article, I seek to identify and discuss some tendencies in Slavic historical linguistics in recent years. Rather than presenting an extensive catalogue of studies on miscellaneous topics, I focus on three general issues, viz., how Slavic historical linguistics is developing in response to new theoretical ideas, methodological innovation, and “new” data. The article explores case studies from the syntax, morphology, and phonology of a number of Slavic languages and tells eight stories about Slavic historical linguistics in the 21st century.
Irina A. Sekerina
Abstract: This article provides an update on research in Slavic psycholinguistics since 2000 following my first review (Sekerina 2006), published as a position paper for the workshop The Future of Slavic Linguistics in America (SLING2K). The focus remains on formal experimental psycholinguistics understood in the narrow sense, i.e., experimental studies conducted with monolingual healthy adults. I review five dimensions characteristic of Slavic psycholinguistics—populations, methods, domains, theoretical approaches, and specifc languages—and summarize the experimental data from Slavic languages published in general non-Slavic psycholinguistic journals and proceedings from the leading two conferences on Slavic linguistics, FASL and FDSL, since 2000. I argue that the current research trends in Slavic psycholinguistics are (1) a shift from adult monolingual participants to special population groups, such as children, people with aphasia, and bilingual learners, (2) a continuing move in the direction of cognitive neuroscience, with more emphasis on online experimental techniques, such as eye-tracking and neuroimaging, and (3) a focus on Slavic-specific phenomena that contribute to the ongoing debates in general psycholinguistics. The current infrastructural trends are (1) development of psycholinguistic databases and resources for Slavic languages and (2) a rise of psycholinguistic research conducted in Eastern European countries and disseminated in Slavic languages.
Andrea D. Sims
Abstract: This state-of-the- eld article traces some recent trajectories of morphological theory, illustrated via four classic problems of Slavic morphology: vowel-zero alter- nation, stem consonant mutations, paradigmatic gaps, and animacy-determined accusative syncretism. Using Russian as the primary illustrating data, one theme that emerges is that theories that leverage the distributional properties of the lexicon have made progress against previously intractable aspects of these phenomena, including idiosyncratic lexical distributions, unexpected (non)productivity, and distributions shared by distinct exponents. In turn, the analyses raise new questions.
Contents
From the Editor 1
Articles
Elena Boudovskaia
Past Tense in the Rusyn Dialect of Novoselycja: Auxiliary vs.
Subject Pronoun as the First- and Second-Person Subject 3
Yaroslav Gorbachov
The Proto-Slavic Genitive-Locative Dual: A Reappraisal of
(South-)West Slavic and Indo-European Evidence 63
Wojciech Guz
Resumptive Pronouns in Polish co Relative Clauses 95
Reviews
Jens Fleischhauer
Olga Kagan. Scalarity in the verbal domain. 131
Frank Y. Gladney
Andrea D. Sims. Inflectional defectiveness. 141
Marek Majer
Ranko Matasović. Slavic nominal word-formation: Proto-Indo-European origins
and historical development. 147
Article Abstracts
Elena Boudovskaia
Abstract: This article discusses the choice of the past-tense forms in the Rusyn dialect spoken in the village of Novoselycja in Zakarpats’ka oblast’ of Ukraine. The past- tense forms for the 1st and 2nd person in Rusyn are formed by a participle accompa- nied either by an enclitic auxiliary or by a fully stressed subject pronoun (the former construction occurs more often), but not by both. The factors in uencing the choice of one over the other have never been clear. I claim that in Novoselycja Rusyn the factor that in uences the choice of an auxiliary or a subject pronoun is a discourse factor. The choice between auxiliaries and pronouns generally depends on the position in discourse: the pronoun codes the rst mention of the 1st and 2nd person subject and the auxiliary subsequent mentions. The exceptions, auxiliaries in locally initial posi- tions and pronouns in locally subsequent positions, show dependence on the speech genre: speakers prefer pronouns at the beginning of episodes in classical narratives, and auxiliaries in genres closer to interactional conversation.
Yaroslav Gorbachov
Abstract: The preservation of length in the West Slavic and South-West Slavic genitive-locative dual in *-ū is unexpected and to date unexplained. BCS rùkū ‘handsGEN.PL’ is likely to continue a trisyllabic preform. At the same time, Indo-Iranian and Greek o er strong evidence for PIE o-stem and ā-stem archetypes that should have yielded late Proto-Slavic and OCS *-oju (thus, OCS *ro ̨koju), rather than *-u. The actually a ested OCS form is ro ̨ku. The present study seeks to provide a uni ed ac- count of these two problems. The development of some of the PIE dual endings in other daughter traditions, including Greek and its dialects, is also addressed.
Wojciech Guz
Abstract: This paper discusses the problem of resumptive pronouns in Polish object relative clauses introduced by the relative marker co. It does so through the use of corpus data, thus contributing to previous literature, which has been largely based on introspection. In the literature, di erent accounts vary signi cantly as to the basic question of when the resumptive pronoun is expected. The present study addresses this ma er by means of qualitative and quantitative analysis of conversational spo- ken Polish—the language variety in which co relatives typically occur. As is shown, the relatives are used in two broad con gurations—unmarked (with null resumptives and inanimate referents) and marked (with overt resumptives and human referents). Both scenarios are linked to distinct strategies of case recovery. The presence of the pronoun itself is one such strategy. In contrast, the omission of the pronoun is of- ten accompanied by case-matching e ects that facilitate the omission. Another typ- ical property of co relatives is their preference for encoding de niteness of referents, whereby kt ry clauses tend to signal inde niteness. This is evidenced by the frequent cooccurrence of co clauses with head-internal demonstratives. Interestingly, these head-internal demonstratives can also render resumptive pronouns unnecessary, thus constituting another factor relevant in resumption.
2016
Contents
From the Editor 261
In Memoriam Charles E. Gribble 265
In Memoriam Dean S. Worth 269
Articles
Katarzyna Dziwirek
Smell in Polish: Lexical Semantics and Cultural Values 273
Olga Kagan
Measurement across Domains: A Unified Account of the
Adjectival and the Verbal Attenuative po- 301
Elena Kulinich, Phaedra Royle, and Daniel Valois
Palatalization in the Russian Verb System:
A Psycholinguistic Study 337
Tore Nesset
A FOOTnote to the Jers: The Russian Trochee-Iamb
Shift and Cognitive Linguistics 359
Reviews
Peter Arkadiev
Cynthia M. Vakareliyska. Lithuanian root list. 93
Rosemarie Connolly
Sijmen Tol and René Genis, eds., with Ekaterina Bobyleva and
Eline van der Veken. Bibliography of Slavic linguistics: 2000–2014. 399
Jacek Witkoś
David Pesetsky. Russian case morphology and the syntactic categories. 405
Article Abstracts
Katarzyna Dziwirek
Abstract: Verbs of perception have been typically classified into three semantic groups. Gisborne (2010) calls the three categories agentive (listen class), experiencer (hear class), and percept (sound class). Examples pertaining to the sense of smell in English use the same lexical item (smell), while in Polish, the three senses of smell are expressed with different verbs: wąchać (agentive), czuć zapach (experiencer), and pachnieć (percept). In metaphorical extensions of the verbs of sensory perception these verbs often stand for mental states, as meaning shifts typically involve the transfer from concrete to abstract domains. I show that the metaphorical extensions of pachnieć and percept to smell are quite different. Not only does pachnieć not suggest bad character or dislike- able characteristics, it actually conveys the opposite, as in the expression coś komuś pachnie ‘something is attractive to someone’ or when used without a modifier. These differences stem from the positive meaning of pachnieć and the negative meaning of to smell. Since the percept verbs of smell seem to be intrinsically positively or negatively valued, they do not lend themselves to universal Mind-as-Body extensions. I also consider some of the dramatic frequency contrasts between Polish and English smell constructions and show they can have their root in different cultural scripts underlying modes of speaking (pachnieć jak vs. smell like), framing of experiences (czuć zapach vs. experiencer to smell), polysemy, and different constructional capabilities (wąchać vs. to sniff ).
Olga Kagan
Abstract: In the recent literature on gradable predicates, it has been argued that the notion of a differential degree (one that measures the distance between two values on a scale) plays a role in the semantics of both adjectival and verbal predicates. This paper provides further evidence in favor of this claim by putting forward a unified account of the prefix po- that attaches to Russian comparative adjectives/adverbs and the attenuative po- that combines with verbs. Building on Filip’s (2000) and Součková’s (2004a, b) analysis of the verbal po-, it is argued that po- is a single prefix whose function is to restrict the differential degree and which applies within the verbal, adjectival, and adverbial domains. In addition, this paper investigates the interaction of this prefix with verbs lexicalizing scales of different dimensions.
Elena Kulinich, Phaedra Royle, and Daniel Valois
Abstract: This paper presents experimental data on the processing of loanwords and nonce words that focuses on morphophonological alternations in Russian. It addresses the issue of how stem allomorphy involving palatalization of the velar/palatal and dental/palatal types in the Russian verb system is processed in adults. The processing of morphophonological alternations is shown to be quite variable (and probably un- productive) and to depend, on the one hand, on the distribution of allomorphs within the verb paradigm, and on the other hand, on verb class productivity. It is hypothe- sized that these differences should be reflected in child language acquisition.
Tore Nesset
Abstract: This article explores the fall and vocalization of the jers, making five claims. First, it is shown how the jer shift can be analyzed in terms of a trochaic pattern, whereby a jer fell unless it headed a foot. Second, the foot-based approach is argued to be superior to the traditional counting mechanism postulated for the jer shift in that the foot-based approach avoids ad hoc stipulations and facilitates crosslinguistic comparison. Third, the present study relates the fall of the jers to a trochee-iamb shift in Russian prosody; a few generations after the jer shift was completed, an iambic pat- tern was introduced through the emergence of akan’e. Fourth, it is proposed that Con- temporary Standard Russian may be a “switch language,” i.e., a language in which productive processes are sensitive to both trochees and iambs. Last but not least, the present study analyzes prosodic change from the point of view of cognitive linguis- tics (the Usage-Based Model) and shows that this framework offers a straightforward account of the jer shift.
Special Issue
Agreement in Slavic
Edited by
Boban Arsenijević, Marijana Kresić, Nedžad Leko, Andrew Nevins, and Jana Willer-Gold
From the Guest Editors 1
Articles
Nadira Aljović and Muamera Begović
Morphosyntactic Aspects of Adjectival and Verbal First-Conjunct Agreement 7
Boban Arsenijević and Ivana Mitić
On the Number-Gender (In)dependence in Agreement with Coordinated Subjects 41
Nermina Čordalija, Amra Bešić, Ivana Jovović, Nevenka Marijanović, Lidija Perković, Midhat Šaljić, Dženana Telalagić, and Nedžad Leko
Grammars of Participle Agreement with Conjoined Subjects in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian 71
Paulina Łęska
Agreement under Case Matching in Polish co and który Relative Clauses Headed by Numerically Quantified Nouns 113
Marijan Palmović and Jana Willer-Gold
Croatian Mixed-Gender Conjunct Agreement: An ERP Study 137
Eva Pavlinušić and Marijan Palmović
Object-Clitic Agreement in Croatian: An ERP Study 161
Jana Willer-Gold, Boban Arsenijević, Mia Batinić, Nermina Čordalija, Marijana Kresić, Nedžad Leko, Franc Lanko Marušič, Tanja Milićev, Nataša Milićević, Ivana Mitić, Andrew Nevins, Anita Peti-Stantić, Branimir Stanković, Tina Šuligoj, and Jelena Tušek
Conjunct Agreement and Gender in South Slavic: From Theory to Experiments to Theory 187
Jacek Witkoś and Dominika Dziubała-Szrejbrowska
Numeral Phrases as Subjects and Agreement with Participles and Predicative Adjectives 225
Article Abstracts
Nadira Aljović and Muamera Begović
Abstract: The paper defines and analyzes the morphosyntactic properties of first- conjunct agreement, which arises when an adjective or verb agrees with the high- est/first conjunct of a coordinate noun phrase. This agreement pattern is derived by means of the syntactic operation Agree and a new postsyntactic mechanism which acts as a filter on Vocabulary Insertion within the framework of Distributed Mor- phology. The proposed filter is called Vocabulary Item Feature Harmony, and roughly consists of (phi-)feature identity between Vocabulary Items. The biaspectual analysis, and especially feature harmony, is used to understand and account for gradable and variable acceptability of first-conjunct agreement, as well as the distribution of this agreement pattern in relation to another agreement pattern, namely, masculine plural agreement (with the coordinate phrase as a whole). The investigation is focused on Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian first-conjunct agreement, but the findings could be extrap- olated to similar cases in other languages.
Boban Arsenijević and Ivana Mitić
Abstract: This paper examines the availability of single-conjunct agreement in number and gender in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Reported are the results of an experiment in which coordinated singulars are included, as well as disjunction and negative-con- cord conjunction, next to the typically examined conjoined plurals. The research shows that, contra the general assumptions in the literature (Marušič, Nevins, and Saksida 2007, Marušič, Nevins, and Badecker 2015, Bošković 2009) but in line with ear- lier research (Moskovljević 1983, Bojović 2003), single-conjunct agreement does occur with coordinated singulars, especially in gender, even if less frequently. This paper shows that (i) first-conjunct agreement in gender preverbally and even last-conjunct agreement postverbally are produced above error level, and that the availability of collective interpretations for the coordinated subject influences the acceptability of the different agreement patterns available, and (ii) number and gender agreement do not have to target the same constituent. The findings shed light on the relation between the features of number and gender with regard to the issues of their bundling and simultaneous agreement, where the experimental results suggest that, while number tends to agree in a pattern that fits either semantic agreement or agreement with the entire conjunction, gender prefers to target single members of coordination, the first or the last. We speculate that a degree of “attraction” obtains, whereby number may attract gender to agree with the entire conjunction or gender may attract number to agree with a single conjunct. The results are used to compare two analyses offered in the literature—Marušič, Nevins, and Saksida 2007/Marušič, Nevins, and Badecker 2015 and Bošković 2009—showing that our empirical findings are problematic for both, but give a certain advantage to Marušič and his co-authors.
Nermina Čordalija, Amra Bešić, Ivana Jovović, Nevenka Marijanović, Lidija Perković, Midhat Šaljić, Dženana Telalagić, and Nedžad Leko
Abstract: This paper shows that Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS), like Slovenian, has three distinct strategies for subject-predicate agreement when the subject consists of conjoined noun phrases: (i) agreement with the maximal projection, a Boolean Phrase (&P); (ii) agreement with the conjunct that is closest to the participle; (iii) agreement with the conjunct that is hierarchically the highest. In order to test the initial hypoth- esis that there are three agreement strategies, a controlled experimental study of the morphosyntactic agreement between conjoined subjects and participles in BCS was conducted, consisting of three experiments: an oral-production experiment, a writ- ten-production experiment, and an acceptability-judgment task. The experiments showed a high presence of default agreement and closest-conjunct agreement. Of the preverbal conjoined phrases, 50% elicited default masculine agreement, while 95% of postverbal conjoined noun phrases elicited closest-conjunct agreement. However, the bulk of the analysis was focused on the possibility of treating highest-conjunct agreement (HCA) as a legitimate agreement strategy. The agreement forms in the preverbal-subject (SV) examples showed HCA 7% of the time. Moreover, acceptabil- ity-judgment results showed that scores for HCA examples ranged between 2 and 3 (1 = weakly acceptable; 5 = strongly acceptable). Last-conjunct agreement (LCA) for postverbal-subject (VS) examples, on the other hand, occurred only in 1% of the exam- ples in the corpus, and these examples were mostly rated weakly acceptable by native speakers (1.5/5 on average). For this reason, they were classified as performance errors, eliminating LCA as an agreement strategy. The overall results go against Bošković (2009), who does not acknowledge HCA as a legitimate strategy, but they confirm the findings of Marušič, Nevins, and Badecker (2015).
Paulina Łęska
Abstract: This paper aims to describe subject-verb agreement patterns within Polish co and który relative clauses in which the relativized subject head noun (virile and non- virile) modified by a higher numeral is assigned genitive case. Such subjects in Polish obligatorily induce default 3sg. neut. agreement on the main-clause verbal predicate. However, when the same subject is relativized while also being the relative-clause subject, various agreement options may occur depending on the type of relative marker as well as the grammatical gender of the head noun. In order to examine these agreement possibilities, a survey was conducted measuring Polish native speakers’ acceptability judgments. These patterns suggest that both co and który relatives could be derived via a matching analysis because they both allow optionality of agreement in certain environments. Furthermore, this optionality can be accounted for in terms of Case attraction and syncretism of case found in the paradigms of higher numerals and the relative pronoun który.
Marijan Palmović and Jana Willer-Gold
Abstract: In a recent elicited-production study with native speakers of Slovenian, Marušič, Nevins, and Saksida (2007) and Marušič, Nevins, and Badecker (2015) show that there are three distinct variously attested gender-agreement grammars. In this study, the high temporal-resolution of the ERP (event-related potential) technique was used to detect neurological components and measure the processing cost of the three gender-computing mechanisms. The study is comprised of two acceptability- judgment experiments, using a factorial design with nonmasculine mixed-gender con- juncts. Experiment 1 contrasts two strategies, Distant- (DCA) and Closest-Conjunct Agreement (CCA), to question whether the linear distance between a participle and the two conjuncts is language- or memory-related. The Experiment 1 results show be- haviorally an overall significant effect of gender; and neurologically a memory-related component, the P300. Experiment 2 sets out to detect alternations to the processing cost when default (Def) agreement is added to the experimental paradigm. The Ex- periment 2 results indicate no gender effects; instead, two language-related compo- nents, N250 and N450, were observed, statistically picking out DCA once again. We argue that in an ecologically valid environment where all three grammatical options are made available, processing of DCA is no longer supported by a general cognitive mechanism, such as memory, but is rather computed by language-related processes.
Eva Pavlinušić and Marijan Palmović
Abstract: The present experiment was designed to open a discussion on the processing of anaphoric clitics in Croatian. The aim of the experiment was to examine the role of long-distance anaphoric relations and local structural case constraints during pro- noun interpretation. On-line processing of cliticized direct-object pronouns embedded in a sentence context was examined using the event-related potential (ERP) technique. Pronominal clitics were either morphologically correct or incorrect. Incorrect pronoun forms contained a gender violation, a case violation, or a violation of both gender and case. Electrophysiological response to each of the violation types was measured at the clitic site and at the sentence-final word and compared to activity in the control condition. The results indicate that, as attested in previous studies in other languages, there are functional and temporal differences between the processing of gender and case violations in pronouns. Whereas gender violations elicit late positivity, i.e., the component related to the processing of syntactic difficulties, case violations elicit a biphasic response in the form of early negativity followed by late positivity. A similar ERP effect is observed with double violations as well, albeit with a different distribu- tion of the early negativity. The appearance of early negativities with case violations confirms previous findings on the rapidity of local syntactic processing as compared to the processing of long-distance anaphoric dependencies. At the end of the sentence, the typical wrap-up effect that reflects final semantic integration is replaced by the component related to syntactic reanalysis and repair.
Jana Willer-Gold, Boban Arsenijević, Mia Batinić, Nermina Čordalija, Marijana Kresić, Nedžad Leko, Franc Lanko Marušič, Tanja Milićev, Nataša Milićević, Ivana Mitić, Andrew Nevins, Anita Peti-Stantić, Branimir Stanković, Tina Šuligoj, and Jelena Tušek
Abstract: Agreement with coordinated subjects in Slavic languages has recently seen a rapid increase in theoretical and experimental approaches, contributing to a wider theoretical discussion on the locus of agreement in grammar (cf. Marušič, Nevins, and Saksida 2007; Bošković 2009; Marušič, Nevins, and Badecker 2015). This paper revisits the theoretical predictions proposed for conjunction agreement in a group of South Slavic languages, with a special focus on gender agreement. The paper is based on two experiments involving speakers of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) and Slovenian (Sln). Experiment 1 is an elicited production experiment investigating preverbal-conjunct agreement, while Experiment 2 investigates postverbal-conjunct agreement. The data provide experimental evidence discriminating between syntax proper and distributed-agreement models in terms of their ability to account for pre- verbal highest-conjunct agreement and present a theoretical mechanism for the dis- tinction between default agreement (which has a fixed number and gender, indepen- dent of the value of each conjunct) and resolved agreement (which computes number and gender based on the values of each conjunct and must resolve potential conflicts). Focusing on the variability in the gender-agreement ratio across nine combinations, the experimental results for BCS and Sln morphosyntax challenge the notion of gen- der markedness that is generally posited for South Slavic languages.
Jacek Witkoś and Dominika Dziubała-Szrejbrowska
Abstract: The aim of this article is to briefly analyze the agreement patterns in Polish constructions with quantified subjects and participial/adjectival predicates. The anal- ysis addresses two troublesome issues: the Genitive of Quantification, i.e., the source of Genitive on the nominal complement in structural contexts, and the optionality in agreement in case between the participial/adjectival predicate and the numeral (≥ 5) or the noun of the quantified subject. The essential part of the proposal is based on the nanosyntactic approach to the nature of case, i.e., the split Kase Phrase (Caha 2009, 2010). The analysis is concerned with the functional sequence of the extended nominal projection and its role in the syntactic derivation of case.
2015
Contents
From the Editor 173
In Memoriam Jens Norgard-Sørensen 177
In Memoriam Charles Townsend 181
Reflections
Steven Franks
The Slavic Linguistics Society Comes of Age 189
Articles
Masako Fidler and Václav Cvrček
A Data-Driven Analysis of Reader Viewpoints: Reconstructing the Historical Reader Using Keyword Analysis 197
Frank Y. Gladney
On Forming Deverbal Nouns and Adjectives 241
Julia Kuznetsova and Tore Nesset
In Which Case Are Russians Afraid? Bojat’sja with Genitive and Accusative Objects 255
A. Kate White
The Cognate Boost: A Study of Picture Naming across Proficiency Levels with L2 Learners of Russian 285
Reviews
Krzysztof E. Borowski and Alexandra Fisher
Elżbieta Kaczmarska and Motoki Nomachi, eds. Slavic and
German in contact: Studies from areal and contrastive linguistics. 313
Katarzyna Dziwirek
Jacek Witkoś and Sylwester Jaworski, eds. New insights into
Slavic linguistics. 319
Elisabeth Elliott
Keith Langston and Anita Peti-Stantić. Language
planning and national identity in Croatia. 323
Olga Mitrenina
Anna Bondaruk, Gréte Dalmi, and Alexander Grosu, eds. Advances in the syntax of DPs: Structure, agreement, and case. 331
Abbreviations 343
Article Abstracts
Masako Fidler and Václav Cvrček
A Data-Driven Analysis of Reader Viewpoints:
Reconstructing the Historical Reader Using
Keyword Analysis
Abstract: This study uses corpus-linguistic methods to examine the relation- ship between language usage patterns and divergence in text interpretation. Our target of analysis is a set of texts (Czechoslovak presidential New Year’s addresses from 1975 to 1989), which contemporary readers consider repeti- tious and devoid of content. These texts were statistically contrasted with corpora from two different periods: one from the totalitarian period and the other from the contemporary (post-totalitarian) period. The comparison was based on the Difference Index, the most recent effect-size estimator, which was used to enhance the interpretation of keyword analysis outcomes. The two analyses yield significantly different results: the data from the analy- sis using the contemporary corpus were commensurate with contemporary readers’ impressions; those from the analysis using the totalitarian corpus fluctuated in tandem with (and sometimes in anticipation of) political and social changes during the 15-year period and suggested an interpretation of the texts by a reader more familiar with totalitarian texts.
Frank Y. Gladney
On Forming Deverbal Nouns and Adjectives in Russian
Abstract: Some deverbal nouns and adjectives govern their complements as nouns and adjectives. In vladelec jazykov ‘polyglot’ genitive case is assigned by the Adnominal Genitive Rule, and in zabyvčiva na imena ‘forgetful of names’ na is required similarly as in the gloss. With other deverbal nouns and adjec- tives, e.g., vladenie jazykami ‘a command of languages’ and zabyvajuščaja imena ‘who forgets names’, the form of the complement is governed by the embed- ded verb; compare vladeet jazykami and zabyvaet imena. To capture this affinity, the noun phrase is represented as a noun headed by the noun suffix /-ij/ and containing a verb phrase corresponding to vladeet jazykami, and the adjective phrase is represented as an adjective headed by the adjective suffix /-ušč/ and containing a verb phrase corresponding to zabyvaet imena. These underlying representations give syntax the task of uniting /vlad/ with /-ij/ and /zaby/ with /-ušč/, matters traditionally relegated to a morphology component of the grammar. To relegate them to syntax is to enter uncharted territory.
Julia Kuznetsova and Tore Nesset
In Which Case Are Russians Afraid? Bojat’sja with
Genitive and Accusative Objects
Abstract: The present article investigates case usage with the verb bojat’sja ‘be scared’ in Russian. Many verbs with -sja never combine with objects in the accusative case. The verb bojat’sja historically was among them, but this verb is undergoing a shift and is currently used with both genitive and accusative objects. This study examines the parameters that motivate this change. Using data from the Russian National Corpus and an experimental study, this arti- cle shows that the accusative case is more likely to appear when the object is individuated. It is furthermore demonstrated that the use of accusative objects depends on register: Less restricted registers, such as newspaper texts and answers in the experiment, show higher use of accusative objects.
A. Kate White
The Cognate Boost: A Study of Picture Naming across
Proficiency Levels with L2 Learners of Russian
Abstract: The purpose of this study was to investigate the “cognate boost” in Russian. Based on the Revised Hierarchical Model of bilingual memory and the theory of nonselective language storage in bilinguals, it was assumed that cognates would facilitate the performance of L1 English learners of L2 Russian in a picture-naming task, though this effect would be modulated by proficiency level. Twenty-two college-level learners of Russian from two pro- ficiency levels were asked to complete a picture-naming task in Russian. Half performed a task with cognates present and half without. An analysis of re- sponse time and accuracy showed that cognates facilitate the performance of lower proficiency speakers, while higher proficiency speakers are not affected. These results support the theories mentioned previously and show a cognate effect despite the differing orthographies of English and Russian. This paper presents the results of the quantitative and qualitative analyses and their im- plications for theories of language acquisition and storage.
Contents
From the Editor 1
Articles
Radovan Lučić
Observations on Collective Numerals in
Standard Croatian 3
AnnaMaria Meyer
“Thanks from the mountain!”: Humorous Calques in
Ponglish as an Output of Language Contact and Language Creativity 33
Traci Speed
Manner/Path Typology of Bulgarian Motion Verbs 51
Oscar Swan
Polish Gender, Subgender, and Quasi-Gender 83
Reviews
Ronelle Alexander
PaulLouis Thomas and Vladimir Osipov. Grammaire du
bosniaque, croate, monténégrin, serbe. 123
Mijo Lončarić
Grant H. Lundberg. Dialect leveling in Haloze, Slovenia. 147
Ludmila Pöppel
A. N. Baranov and D. O. Dobrovol’skij. Osnovy frazeologii
(kratkij kurs): Učeb. Posobie. 153
Submission Guidelines and Style Sheet 161
Article Abstracts
Radovan Lučić
Observations on Collective Numerals in Standard Croatian
Abstract: In present-day Croatian there is quite a large discrepancy between the actual usage of numerals and their description in major normative works. This discrepancy seems to be most present in the case of collective numerals, which are normally described as quantifiers for the elements making up a group of mixed gender. The actual usage of many instances of declensions and agreement of collective numerals often remains unexplained. In the clas- sic Hrvatska gramatika (Barić et al. 2005: 219), for example, seven different forms are given for the dative as well as the locative case and four different forms for the genitive. When or how exactly a specific form is used remains unclear. Most Croatian grammars pay very little attention to the agreement of collec- tive numerals and give only nominal agreement in the genitive and some re- marks on possible verbal agreement in the singular and the plural. Conditions for the choice between the alternatives are generally not discussed. This paper attempts to distinguish between the morphological and semantic principles of classification. Furthermore, it describes and discusses the declension, distri- bution, and agreement of collective numerals in present-day spoken Croatian. This is done without adopting a theoretical stance: this study is limited to the comparison of the treatment of collective numerals in different grammars, and the investigation of the extent to which this treatment reflects the actual usage as found in hits sampled from the Internet and the Croatian National Corpus (HNK).
Anna-Maria Meyer
“Thanks from the mountain!”: Humorous Calques in Ponglish as an Output of Language Contact and Language Creativity
Abstract: Since the enlargement of the European Union beginning in 2004, there has been a huge wave of migration to the United Kingdom from Poland. The UK, unlike other EU countries, allowed full access to its labor market to nationals of eight accession countries, including Poland. The diaspora formed new communities and a new contact variety emerged among them, common- ly referred to as “Ponglish.” Although Ponglish has enjoyed some attention within linguistics, the humorous, “technically incorrect” literal translations of Polish words and phrases into English, usually by Poles with a rather high proficiency in English, have remained unexamined to date. This article ana- lyzes the phenomenon of literal translations in Ponglish in detail, based on a number of websites dedicated to the subject, and attempts a classification.
Traci Speed
Manner/Path Typology of Bulgarian Motion Verbs
Abstract: This study examines the Bulgarian motion verb system in terms of what information is typically conveyed by motion verbs in addition to motion itself. The theoretical framework is Talmy’s (1985) typological theory, which divides languages into low-manner verb-framed languages and high-manner satellite-framed languages according to what additional information is typi- cally conflated with motion in a motion event. Bulgarian motion verbs empha- size path of motion to a greater extent than do most other (non-Balkan) Slav- ic languages. Non-Balkan Slavic languages more often use verbs of motion expressing manner in combination with (satellite) prefixes indicating path, while Bulgarian focuses on verbs which express the path of motion, some of which are Bulgarian innovations. These verbs are often prefixed, but the pre- fixes may be fused to the root to the extent that an unprefixed form of the verb does not occur, and prefixation here is no longer productive. Typical examples include the frequent use of the path verb izljaza ‘to exit, go out’ when speakers could also use izletja ‘to fly out’ or izmâkna ‘to sneak out’. This variation in the Bulgarian motion verb system brings Bulgarian closer to the other Balkan languages (especially Greek, with its parallel motion event conflation), and is viewed here as a possible instance of Balkan Sprachbund influence.
Oscar Swan
Polish Gender, Subgender, and Quasi-Gender
Abstract: The question as to how many genders there are in Polish has ab- sorbed linguists for well over half a century. Almost everyone approaching this question has applied a different criterion to the exclusion of other criteria in order to obtain an answer, and answers have ranged from every number from three though nine, or even more. One matter that has never been given due importance is the evidence of third-person pronouns which, in both nom- inative and accusative cases, would seem to have come into existence partly in order to be able to refer to nouns by their gender. All told, evidence points to the existence of four main Polish grammatical genders, consisting of the traditional three (masculine, feminine, neuter) and the Polish innovative one of “masculine personal.” These comprise a tightly knit coherent system. Other gender candidates can be considered to be either “subgenders” (masculine animate and masculine depreciative) or “quasi-genders,” of which there are around half a dozen. The existence and behaviors of the quasi-genders, i.e., nouns that would appear to belong to one gender but can act like another (an example being “facultative animate” nouns, i.e., referentially inanimate nouns that behave as if animate) shows that users of the language remain sen- sitive to mismatches between declension-type, gender, and sexual or animate reference, and will allow referential reality to assert itself against grammati- cal gender in accordance with Corbett’s observation as to the increasing insta- bility of agreement targets the farther they are from the agreement controller.
If we take an Indo-European-type three-gender system (as in German, Polish, or Russian, ignoring subgenders), we find that the meanings we can identify for the personal pronouns are “male,” “female,” and “neither male nor female.” Thus the meaning of the pronouns matchespart of the meaning of prototypical nouns ofthe corresponding genders; it reflects the core meaning of the genders. (Corbett 1991: 245–46)
2014
Contents
From the Editor 165
In Memoriam Roman Laskowski 167
Articles
Christina Bethin
Contraction in Russian Dialects: Evidence for
Paradigm Contrast 171
Franc Marušič and Rok Žaucer
The Involuntary State/feel-like Construction:
What Aspect Cannot Do 185
Ksenia Zanon
Two Russian Hybirds 215
Reviews
Peter Arkadiev
Leonard H. Babby. The syntax of argument structure. 259
Robert Orr
Andreii Danylenko. Slavica et Islamica: Ukrainian in Context. 277
Adam Szczegielniak
Anna Bondaruk. Copular clauses in English and Polish:
Structure, derivation, and interpretation. 293
Article Abstracts
Christina Bethin
Contraction in Russian Dialects: Evidence for Paradigm Contrast
Abstract: Contraction of VjV sequences to V as in aja > a, aje > a, ojo > o, uju > u, eje > e, ije > i is found in northern and central Russian dialects, primarily in non-past verb forms and in adjectives. The focus of this paper is on the manifestation of this process in verbs and specifically on the resistance to contraction found in the 2pl forms. There are several different explanations in the literature for the exceptionality of 2pl forms, but they are not entirely convincing. I propose a new and more comprehensive explanation for the resistance to contraction in this category based on the notion of paradigm contrast.
Franc Marušič and Rok Žaucer
The Involuntary State/feel-like Construction:What Aspect Cannot Do
Abstract: The hyperintensional South Slavic involuntary state/feel-like construction is interesting in that it is restricted to a peculiar syntactic frame (dative subject and reflexive-impersonal or reflexive-passive verb) but has no overt element encoding its desiderative meaning and its intensionality. Recently it received two very different analyses. For Marušič and Žaucer (2006a), the construction is biclausal, with its desiderative meaning coming from a phonologically null verb. For Rivero (2009), its “modal” meaning arises from a viewpoint-aspect imperfective operator in a monoclausal structure. The aspect-based account poses a challenge for the theory of null verbs, since it cancels what had been considered a rare attestation of the theory’s logical possibility of having a null matrix verb. It also poses a challenge for the sententionalist view of hyperintensionality, since it posits that the latter can arise outside a clausal complement. This paper demonstrates that the aspect-based account is problematic in several respects and reinstates the null-verb analysis.
Ksenia Zanon
Two Russian Hybirds
Abstract: This paper reports on a peculiar phenomenon in Russian which involves both a Y/N marker (li) with a wh-word. Under consideration are the two incarnations of this construction—herein called Hybrid Wh-coordination (HWh) and its reverse counterpart (rHWh). In the former the Y/N marker precedes the wh-word (and the coordinator), while in the latter this order is permuted. This surface difference has deeper underpinnings, since the two constructions do not behave in identical fashion with respect to various diagnostics. Hence they are not amenable to the same treatment. I will argue for a biclausal genesis of HWh questions. The rHWh cases, on the other hand, are ambiguous between biclausal and monoclausal structures, depending on the nature of the wh-word. The paper offers novel empirical generalizations, cataloguing previously unreported facts associated with hybrid coordination, as well as some theoretical contributions, bearing on the status of Across-The-Board extractions (ATB), quantifier raising (QR), li-placement, and the distribution of topicalized constituents (TC). In particular, the paper presents arguments in favor of QR in Russian. It is argued that the clauseboundedness restriction can be repaired under ellipsis. ATB movement is analyzed as a process of extraction out of each participating conjunct. The placement of li is understood as a result of PF reordering, which is distinct from Prosodic Inversion. Finally, D-linked wh-phrases are analyzed on a par with TCs.
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Articles
Bradley Larson
Russian Comitatives and the Ambiguity of Adjunction 11
Mila Schwartz and Miriam Minkov
Russian Case System Acquisition among Russian-Hebrew
Speaking Children 51
Remark
Natalia Fitzgibbons
Every Kid Doesn’t Speak English 93
Reviews
Nerea Madariaga
Nikita Mixajlov. Tvoritel'nyj padež v russkom jazyke XVIII veka. 105
Ora Matushansky
Olga Kagan. Semantics of genitive objects in Russian. 115
Radek Šimík
Lydia Grebenyova. Syntax, semantics, and acquisition of
multiple interrogatives: Who wants what? 129
Article Abstracts
Bradley Larson
Russian Comitatives and the Ambiguity of Adjunction
Abstract: There is a conundrum in the study of comitative constructions in Slavic. It has long been an assumption that the construction is best analyzed through two structurally distinct representations: noun modification by a comitative prepositional phrase and verb modification by a comitative prepo-sitional phrase. Another analysis has been proposed that derives the distinc-tions in the construction not from differential attachment sites but rather via differential movement of comitative phrase and its host. In this view, the comitative phrase always adjoins to the host DP, but is sometimes stranded by movement. This paper presents empirical and theoretical arguments against these analyses using data from Russian. It is shown that both differ-ential attachment site analyses and differential movement analyses cannot account for the construction. This conundrum is avoided by adopting a “de-composed Merge”-style analysis to derive structural ambiguity in the con-struction. Under this analysis the ambiguity is an effect of attachment type, not movement or attachment site. This analysis also provides a new avenue to capture the facts that pertain to plural pronoun comitatives. Russian is the test case here for the sake of concision; however the analysis should extend to the rest of the Slavic languages.
Mila Schwartz and Miriam Minkov
Russian Case System Acquisition among Russian-Hebrew Speaking Children
Abstract: The aim of this exploratory study is to examine bilingual Russian–Hebrew-speaking children’s performance on the complex Case System in Russian. The speech of six early sequential bilinguals and three simultaneous bilinguals is analyzed for the quality and quantity of errors. Monolin¬gual data came from two sources. The first source was the error rate of case and number by two normally developing monolingual Russian-speaking children, col-lected recently in the former Soviet Union. The second source was qualitative reports on error types made by monolingual children in the course of Case System acquisition. The following research questions were ex¬amined: (i) Are there differences between bilingual children and age-matched monolingual Russian-speaking children in Russian Case System acquisition? (ii) Are there differences between simultaneous and early sequential bilin¬guals in Russian Case System acquisition? Speech of bilingual children was recorded individu-ally and monthly over a seven-month period, 20 minutes per month per child. Error analysis of the bilingual speech was conducted regarding the following target variables: noun oblique cases (Genitive, Da¬tive, Accusative, Instru-mental, and Prepositional), noun number (singular and plural), and the three declensions. The results show quantitative differ¬ences between simultaneous bilinguals, early sequential bilinguals, and mon¬olin¬guals in Russian Case System acquisition.
Natalia Fitzgibbons
Every Kid Doesn’t Speak English
Abstract: This paper provides arguments based on Czech, Polish, Russian, and Serbo-Croatian that distributive universal subjects of negated sentences allow the surface scope interpretation on the order SUBJECT > NEGATION, contrary to Zeijlstra 2004. This observation agrees with theories of negative concord that take negative concord items as universal quantifiers taking scope above sen-tential negation. The arguments are based on available scope interpretations and correlations between word order and scope.
2013
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.
“Aspect in Slavic: Creating Time, Creating Grammar,” guest edited by Laura A. Janda
Contents
From the Guest Editor: “Creating the Contours of Grammar” 1
Articles
Henning Andersen
On the Origin of the Slavic Aspects: Aorist and Imperfect 17
Östen Dahl
How Telicity Creates Time 45
Stephen M. Dickey
See, Now They Vanish: Third-Person Perfect Auxiliaries in
Old and Middle Czech 77
Tore Nesset
The History of the Russian Semelfactive:
The Development of a Radial Category 123
Svetlana Sokolova
Verbal Prefixation and Metaphor: How Does Metaphor
Interact with Constructions? 171
Article Abstracts
Henning Andersen
On the Origin of the Slavic Aspects: Aorist and Imperfect
Abstract: This article presents a sketch of the prehistorical development of the Common Slavic preterital imperfect/aorist category. The methods of in¬ternal analysis and linguistic geography are applied to mostly well-established data in order to reconstruct major elements of this development, in particular the relative chronology of the main morphological changes, correlations with well-known Common Slavic phonological changes, as well as correlations of regional morphological differences with major phonological isoglosses. The results contribute to our understanding of the development of Common Slavic and its dialectal differentiation in the period of the “Slavic migrations”.
Östen Dahl
How Telicity Creates Time
Abstract: Most treatments of temporal semantics start out from the conception of time as a line stretching from the past into the future, which is then populated with eventualities or situations. This paper explores how time can be seen as emerging from the construction of representations of reality in which the basic building blocks are static—i.e., timeless—representations, which are connected to each other by events that are transitions between them and that create an ordering which can be understood as temporal. This connects to von Wright’s “logic of change” and the “hybrid semantics” suggested by Herweg and Löbner. In this context, telicity is seen as the capacity of events, or of the predicates that express them, to “create time” in the sense of defining a before and an after. The basic elements of the model are global states, which are timeless taken in isolation but are connected by transition events, which transform one global state into another and thereby define the temporal relationships between them. Transition events, corre¬sponding to Vendlerian achievements, represent simple changes which are then the basis for all other constructs in the model, most notably delimited states, Vendlerian activities (atelic dynamic eventualities), and accomplish-ments (telic non-punctual even¬tualities), but also time points and intervals. Transition events are further in-strumental in constructing narrative structures and are responsible for narrative progression.
Stephen M. Dickey
See, Now They Vanish: Third-Person Perfect Auxiliaries in Old and Middle Czech
Abstract: This article argues that Czech retained a semantic distinction be¬tween the expression of current relevance/emphasis and a neutral preterit in third-person compound preterit forms until the late sixteenth century. The distinction was expressed by the presence (expressing current relevance/em¬phasis) vs. absence (neutral preterit) of third-person auxiliaries. The hypothe¬sis is based on data from two late fourteenth-century narratives (Asenath and The Life of Adam and Eve) and from letters written by or to Czech women from 1365 to 1615. The results of statistical analyses are presented as support for the hypothesis, and it is suggested that the continued distinction between current relevance/emphasis and a neutral preterit in the third person is in part responsible for the fact that the two-way use of imperfective verbs never be¬came a major usage pattern in Czech, in contrast with Russian, where the tense system was reduced relatively early.
Tore Nesset
The History of the Russian Semelfactive: The Development of a Radial Category
Abstract: This paper explores the history of suffixed semelfactive verbs in Russian, i.e., verbs like maxnut’ ‘wave once’ with the nu suffix. It is argued that the semelfactive aktionsart is best analyzed as a radial category organized around a prototype with four properties: uniformity, instantaneousness, non-resultativity, and single occurrence, which are defined and discussed in the article. This paper further demonstrates that there is a small group of verbs denoting bodily acts that meet these criteria in the Old Church Slavonic texts, thus suggesting the existence of an embryonic version of the semelfactive aktionsart in Common Slavic. Although the cue validity of nu as a marker of semelfactivity remains stable, in Old Russian nu with semelfactive meaning is shown to spread to auditory verbs, optical verbs, and verbs of physical movement, which are argued to constitute a radial category organized around prototypical bodily acts. This gradual expansion through the lexicon continues in Contemporary Standard Russian; in particular a number of semelfactive behavior verbs have emerged, although many of them are of low frequency.
Svetlana Sokolova
Verbal Prefixation and Metaphor: How Does Metaphor Interact with Constructions?
Abstract: This article argues that metaphorical and non-metaphorical content find different expression on the constructional level. The hypothesis is supported by two empirical case studies of the Russian Locative Alternation verbs, based on the data from the Russian National Corpus: the unprefixed verb sypat’ ‘strew’ (which does not have an aspectual partner) and the unpre¬fixed verb gruzit’ ‘load’ and its three perfective partners with the prefixes na-, za-, and po-. It is argued that metaphorical extensions of these Locative Alter-nation verbs have a strong relationship with elaborations (interactions be¬tween different constructions), on the one hand, and reduction (Locative Alternation constructions with a reduced or omitted participant), on the other. The results indicate differences in metaphorical behavior of different prefixes (even when they are used to form perfective partner verbs) and different constructions (some constructions are more often instantiated as metaphorical extensions than the other).
2012
Contents
From the Editor 149
Articles
Vít Boček
On the Relationship between Gemination and Palatalization in
Early Romance Loanwords in Common Slavic 151
Hans Robert Mehlig
Hybrid Predicates in Russian 171
Ivana Mitrović
A Phonetically Natural vs. Native Language Pattern:
An Experimental Study of Velar Palatalization in Serbian 229
Catherine Ringen and Vladimir Kulikov
Voicing in Russian Stops: Cross-Linguistic Implications 269
Reviews
Hagen Pitsch
Ljudmila Geist. Die Kopula und ihr Komplemente:
Zur Kompositionalität in Kopulasätzen 287
Mila Vulchanova
Björn Hansen and Jasmina Grković-Major, eds. Diachronic
Slavonic syntax: Gradual changes in focus 299
Index to Volumes 1–20 311
Article Abstracts
Vít Boček
On the Relationship between Gemination and Palatalization in Early Romance Loanwords in Common Slavic
Abstract: This paper discusses how geminates in Early Romance loanwords were treated in Common Slavic. The proposal is that there was a tendency for Romance geminates to be replaced by palatalized consonants in Slavic, possibly via an early palatalized geminate stage in Slavic itself. This proposal receives support from the close relation between gemination and palatalization found in other Indo-European languages and presents a more systematic account of the phenomenon than other available explanations.
Hans Robert Mehlig
Hybrid Predicates in Russian
Abstract: Apart from elementary predications that can be classified clearly as Activities or Accomplishments, Russian has elementary predications that are hybrid in their actionality and can be classified as Activities as well as Accomplishments. With regard to the category of aspect in Russian, these hybrid predications are characterized by the fact that they can be coded perfective not only by a paired perfective verb but also by a so-called delimitative procedural verb. The first part of this paper examines the conditions under which elementary predications can be interpreted as hybrid. Two different types of hybrid Accomplishments will be distinguished. First, there are hybrid Accomplishments where the Activity component is conceptualized as a homogeneous continuous process and thus fulfills the principle of arbitrary divisibility. In this case the imperfective aspect, which forms the basis for coding the Accomplishment as perfective by a delimitative procedural verb, has durative-processual meaning. Second, there are hybrid Accomplishments where the Activity component consists of several randomly ordered subevents and thus fulfills the principle of cumulativity. In this case the Activity component has conative meaning. The second part shows that elementary predications that are not hybrid in their actionality can be reclassified in their actionality by temporal distributivity and in that case are also characterized as hybrid. The third part deals with predications with an inner argument modified by quantifying determiners and measure expressions. I show that these predications likewise allow a reclassification by temporal distributivity. However, this is only the case if the extent of the entities involved in the situation is determined in advance.
Ivana Mitrović
A Phonetically Natural vs. Native Language Pattern: An Experimental Study of Velar Palatalization in Serbian
Abstract: Two experiments test the naturalness hypothesis of velar palatalization. This hypothesis, based on surveys of various languages with velar palatalization, states that if a language has palatalization before [e], then it will have palatalization before [i], but not necessarily vice versa. Serbian is a prima facie counterexample to this generalization in certain morphosyntactic contexts, including the present-tense paradigm examined in this paper. In this context, Serbian palatalizes a velar stop [k] to a palatoalveolar affricate [ê] before [e] but not before [i]. Two experiments are conducted to test whether Serbian-speaking children and adults generalize from the existing pattern of palatalization before [e] to the natural pattern of palatalization before both mid and high vowels. The results from the first experiment show that children conform to the phonetically natural pattern but adults do not. These results suggest that speakers must be exposed to the pattern that “violates” the phonetically natural one for a substantial period of time before overwriting the phonetically natural pattern. The results from the second experiment, artificial pattern learning, show that the type of task and the type of palatalization (before [i] or [e]) play a crucial role, while age does not. These findings strengthen the hypothesis that subjects are more likely to choose a phonetically natural form presented to them than to volunteer it.
Catherine Ringen and Vladimir Kulikov
Voicing in Russian Stops: Cross-Linguistic Implications
Abstract: This paper presents the results of an investigation of voicing in utterance-initial and intervocalic stops in monolingual Russian speakers. Prevoicing was found in over 97% of the lenis stops; over 97% of the intervocalic stops were fully voiced. Utterance-initial fortis stops were pronounced as voiceless unaspirated and had short positive VOT. Intervocalic fortis stops were completely voiceless except for a short voicing tail into closure. These results are relevant for typological studies of voicing. Some studies of languages with a two-way contrast between initial stops with prevoicing and short lag VOT have reported that prevoicing is less robust than what might be expected. These findings have been attributed to influence from another language without prevoicing. Our results with monolingual speakers of Russian support these claims. Our results are also relevant for the debate about the laryngeal feature in aspirating languages, which often have some voicing of intervocalic lenis stops. Such voicing has been attributed to passive voicing, in contrast with active voicing that occurs in true voice languages such as Russian. We found that the voicing in Russian is much more robust than the intervocalic voicing in aspirating languages. This difference is explained if the features of contrast are different in the two types of languages: [voice] in the case of Russian and [spread glottis] in the case of aspirating languages.
Contents
Articles
Andrii Danylenko
Auxiliary Clitics in Southwest Ukrainian:
Questions of Chronology, Areal Distribution,
and Grammaticalization 3
Barbara Schmiedtová and Natalya Sahonenko
Acquisition of L2 Written Narrative Competence:
Tense-Switching by Russian L2 Speakers of German 35
Miriam Shrager
Neutralization of Word-Final Voicing in Russian 71
Reviews
Barbara Citko
Jacek Witkoś and Gisbert Fanselow, eds. Elements of
Slavic and Germanic grammars: A Comparative view.
Papers on topical issues in syntax and morphosyntax. 101
Maciej Czerwiński
Anita Peti-Stantić. Jezik naš i/ili njihov. Vježbe iz poredbene
povijesti južnoslavenskih standardizacijskih procesa. 111
Robert Orr
Juhani Nuorluoto, ed. The Slavicization of the Russian
north: Mechanisms and chronology. 121
Robert A. Rothstein
Tomasz Kamusella. Schlonzska mowa. Język, Górny Śląsk
i nacjonalizm, 1; Andrzej Roczniok. Zbornik polsko-ślůnski/
Słownik polsko-śląski, 1: A–K, 2: L–P. 145
Article Abstracts
Andrii Danylenko
Auxiliary Clitics in Southwest Ukrainian: Questions of Chronology, Areal Distribution, and Grammaticalization
Abstract: This paper addresses grammaticalization of the preterit and future auxiliary clitics derived from the verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to take’ in Southwest Ukrainian in comparison with North and Southeast Ukrainian, and the adja¬cent western and eastern Slavic dialects. It posits a parallel grammaticaliza¬tion of such auxiliaries in the aspect of retrospection (preterit) and the aspect of prospection (future), although with different results in various Ukrainian dialects. Unlike the Polish auxiliaries that turned into person-number markers, the preterit auxiliary clitics are not fully degrammaticalized in Southwest Ukrainian and are altogether absent from North and Southeast Ukrainian. The auxiliary clitics used in the de-inceptive future derived from the periphrastic formation with the auxiliary ‘to take’ were undergoing grammaticalization along the clitic continuum postulated in the paper for the Ukrainian-speaking territories. The term ‘synthetic future‘ in Modern Ukrainian for formations like čytatymu ‘I will read’ is misleading, since the grammaticalization of the auxiliary did not run to completion. This explains its loose integration with the infinitive and the de-inceptive interpretation of the synthetic future ‘I will [begin] to read’ as compared to the analytic future formation ja budu čytaty ‘I will read’ in all the major Ukrainian dialects.
Barbara Schmiedtová and Natalya Sahonenko
Acquisition of L2 Written Narrative Competence: Tense-Switching by Russian L2 Speakers of German
Abstract: The present study examines how foreground and background is marked in L1 Russian and L1 German, to test the hypothesis that L1 speakers of Russian writing in German as L2 will use tense-switching to differentiate foreground and background. Results suggest that Russian-speaking writers used grammatical aspect while German-speaking writers employed inherent properties of the verbal predicate to mark foreground and background. The L2 data revealed a more mixed pattern: one third of the Russian-speaking L2 speakers of German used L1 Russian pattern, switching between different tenses to mark foreground and background; another third of the Russian-speaking L2 users of German were comparable to L1 German speakers; and a third group of the Russian-speaking L2 users of German wrote their texts in the present tense. These results indicate that switching between foreground and background, as a critical property of proficient narrative discourse, con-stitutes a long-lasting challenge in learning a second language.
Miriam Shrager
Neutralization of Word-Final Voicing in Russian
Abstract: This paper has two aims. The first is to describe a pilot instrumental study of the incomplete neutralization of Russian final dental stops /t/ and /d/. This study refutes the results of a previous instrumental study of word-final voicing neutralization, which suggested that /t/ and /d/ are completely neu-tralized word-finally. The study examines several phonetic quantities that might be correlated with incomplete neutralization and serve as cues for the correct classification of voiced and voiceless obstruents. The second aim is to bring forward an extensive summary and discussion of previous studies and theories on incomplete neutralization.
2011
Contents
In Memoriam Maria Babyonyshev 165
Articles
Stephen M. Dickey
The Varying Role of PO- in the Grammaticalization of Slavic Aspectual Systems: Sequences of Events, Delimitives, and German Language Contact 175
Roksolana Mykhaylyk
Middle Object Scrambling 231
George Rubinstein
Aspectual Clusters of Russian Sound Verbs 273
Reviews
Keith Langston
Snježana Kordić. Jezik i nacionalizam 327
Jouko Lindstedt
Evangelia Adamou. Le nashta: Description d’un parler slave de Grèce en voie de disparition 339
Article Abstracts
Stephen M. Dickey
The Varying Role of PO- in the Grammaticalization of Slavic Aspectual Systems: Sequences of Events, Delimitives, and German Language Contact
Abstract: This article presents a comparative analysis of three interrelated phenomena: the use of imperfective verbs in sequences of events in Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, Slovene, and BCS; the use of po- delimitatives in sequences of events in East Slavic, Polish, and Bulgarian; the semantic nature of the prefix po- in the individual Slavic languages has been retained (and perhaps strengthened) due to German language contact, whereas the use of po- delimitatives for such atelic predicates represents an innovation in those languages that did not undergo significant amounts of such German language contact. The second is that the lack of the development of po- into an important perfectivizing prefix in the western languages is likewise due in part to German language contact, as po- was at various times used to calque German be- in its surface-contact, in the western languages is likewise due in part to German language contact, as po- was at various times used to calque German be- in is surface-contact and transitive meanings as well as ver- in its meaning of change of state; such calques contributed to the stabilization of po- as a lexical prefix in the western languages. The retarding effect of German language contact on the western languages whereby imperfective verbs remained acceptable in sequences of events, and po- did not become a major perfectivizing prefix, is analyzed as the result of a process of "replica preservation," as opposed to the more commonly discussed process of "replica change" describe by Heine and Kuteva(2005).
Roksolana Mykhaylyk
Middle Object Scrambling
Abstract: This paper discusses syntactic and semantic aspects of direct object scrambling in Ukrainian. Given the complex nature of scrambling, the investigation is narrowed to only one of its types: the change SVO to SOV, defined as Middle Object Scrambling (MOS). This strategy affords a detailed examination of this phenomenon at a micro-level. MOS is scrutinized with regard to its syntactic aspects (e.g., position of a moved element) and semantic properties (e.g., possible interpretations of a direct object). The semantic features of definiteness, referentiality, and partitivity are particularly emphasized, as previous studies have claimed they play an important role in the process. This research demonstrates that the most relevant feature in Ukrainian MOS is specificity in the sense of partitivity/presuppositionality. The implication of this is that Slavic data provide further support for the universality of interpretational properties of the vP edge, in line with Chomsky 2001.
George Rubinstein
Aspectual Clusters of Russian Sound Verbs
Abstract: This article explores whether the aspectual cluster model proposed by Janda (2007, 2008) can reflect the differences in the lexical semantics of Russian verbs denoting sound. A corpus of fifty sound verbs, including both sounds emitted by inanimate objects and those produced by animate beings, are divided into two groups: (i)paired verbs marking linguistic action, and (ii) paired verbs marking directional motion. Aspectual clusters for each verb were determined, and the clusters of various groups of verbs compared. Each of these groups was found to be characterized by a specific subset of aspectual cluster types.
Contents
In Memoriam Daniela S. Hristova 3
In Memoriam Horace G. Lunt 7
In Memoriam Rudolf Růžička 13
Articles
Varja Cvetko-Orešnik and Janez Orešnik
Natural Syntax of Slovenian: The Complex Sentence 19
Olga Kagan
On Speaker Identifiability 47
Igor Mel’čuk and Jasmina Milićević
“Budalo jedna!”-Type Constructions in Contemporary Serbian 85
Reviews
Frank Y. Gladney, Victoria Hasko and Renee Perelmutter, eds.
New Approaches to Slavic Verbs of Motion 119
Joseph Schallert, Jouko Lindstedt, Ljudmil Spasov, and Juhani Nuorluoto, eds.
The Konikovo Gospel: Konikovsko evangelie 131
Anastassia Zabrodskaja Ingunn Lunde and Martin Paulsen, eds.
From Poets to Padonki: Linguistic Authority and Norm Negotiation in Modern Russian Culture 153
Article Abstracts
Varja Cvetko-Orešnik and Janez Orešnik
Natural Syntax of Slovenian: The Complex Sentence
Abstract: This paper applies the framework of Natural Syntax to complex sentences in Slovenian, with the twin goals of introducing the framework to Slavists and showing how it deals with Slavic language data. The framework of Natural Syntax as initiated by Janez Orensnik, in the tradition of (morphological) naturalness as established by Wolfgang Dressler and Willi Mayerthaler, is a developing deductive theory. The naturalness judgments are couched in naturalness scales, which follow from the basic parameters (or "axioms") listed at the beginning of the paper. The predictions of the theory are calculated in what are known as deductions, the chief components of each being a pair of naturalness scales and the rules governing the alignment of corresponding naturalness values. Parallel an chiastic alignment are distinguished and related to Henning Andersen's early work on markedness.
Olga Kagan
On Speaker Identifiability
Abstract: In this paper, I investigate the notion of speaker indentifiablity, a term that is strongly associated with the pragmatic approach to specificity. Following Haspelmath 1997, I provide evidence from Russian for the linguistic relevance of speaker identifiablity. In particular, I discuss two series of existential indefinites, koe- items and -to items, which are inherently specified as identifiable or not identifiable to the speaker. This specification is shown to be independent of such phenomena as the free-choice effect or narrow scope relative to another operator in the logical form of the sentence. I propose a formal analysis of speaker identifiablity formulated within the framework of possible-world semantics. According to this account, an NP is speaker-world that is compatible with the speaker's worldview. Speaker identifiablity is analyzed as a condition on the relative scope of an existential operator that ranges over individuals and a universal quantifier which quantifies over a s set of possible worlds introduce by the context. I also argue that the speaker (non-)identifiablity meaning component contributed by the investigated items constitutes a conventional implicature.
Igor Mel’čuk and Jasmina Milićević
“Budalo jedna!”-Type Constructions in Contemporary Serbian
Abstract: This paper describes the qualifying exclamatory construction in Serbian exemplified by Budalo jedna! 'What a fool you are!'. This construction belongs to non-descriptive (or SIGNALATIVE) linguistic expressions which cannot be questioned, negated, or freely modified. The lexicographic description of such expressions has received insufficient attention. We argue that in the above construction the adjective JEDAN intensifies the speaker's negative feelings such that the construction means: 'You are a fool and I feel very negatively about it'. Extensions of the construction include the use of JEDAN with a positive evaluative noun, which produces an ironic effect (e.g. Genije jedan! 'You are the opposite of a genius and I feel very negatively about it') and with a non-evaluative noun, which results in the "transfer" of negativeness to the noun (e.g., Profesore jedan! 'You act as a typical professor [which is bad], and I feel very negatively about it"). Since all these effects are attributable to JEDAN, we describe the qualifying exclamatory construction in the lexical entry for JEDAN.
2010
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.
Contents
In Memorium Dalibor Brozović 3
Articles
Christina Y. Bethin
Perceptual Salience in Dialect Contact: The Okan’e/Akan’e Dialects of East Slavic 7
Natalia Fitzgibbons
Free Standing n- Words in Russian: A Syntactic Account 55
James Lavine
Case and Events in Transitive Impersonals 101
Reviews
Frank Y. Gladney
Edmund Gussman. The Phonology of Polish 131
Ivona Kučerová
Anne Sturgeon. The Left Periphery: The interaction of syntax, pragmatics and prosody in Czech 141
Robert Orr
Jussi Halla-Aho. Problems of Proto-Slavic Historical Morphology 153
Tanya Skubiak
Laada Bilaniuk. Contested Tongues: Language Politics and Cultural Correction in Ukraine 169
Article Abstracts
Christina Y. Bethin
Perceptual Salience in Dialect Contact: The Okan’e/Akan’e Dialects of East Slavic
Abstract: In East Slavic, akan’e (neutralization of /o/ and /a/ after non-palatalized consonants) has spread or is spreading to dialects which maintain the mid- and low-vowel contrast (okan’e). Under the assumption that vowel neutralization is favored in durationally deprived syllables, it is expected that akan’e would first spread in weak positions, and in some transitional dialects this is exactly what happens: akan’e is found in non-immediately pretonic and post-tonic syllables. But in other dialects, the patterns of akan’e spread are unexpected: it first appears in the immediately pretonic position and before stressed high vowels and often before stressed /a/ before it occurs elsewhere. I focus on these unexpected patterns and suggest that they may emerge as a consequence of perceptual salience through contact with neighboring strong akan’e dialects in Pskov and Novgorod oblasts of Russia and in Homel’ and Minsk oblasts of Belarus. Similar patterns are found in other East Slavic dialect contact situations under similar conditions, as is to be expected.
Natalia Fitzgibbons
Free Standing n- Words in Russian: A Syntactic Account
Abstract: This article provides a syntactic account of freestanding n-words in Russian. The analysis is based on the theory in Brown 1999, where Russian n-words are licensed by agreement with the sentential negation head. Under the proposed analysis, freestanding n-words are licensed by agreement with a phonologically null negative head. The article works out the details of this agreement process for both n-words licensed by sentential negation and freestanding n-words licensed by a phonologically null negative head. As a result, it provides an argument that the driving force of movement must lie in the moving element, the n-word.
James Lavine
Case and Events in Transitive Impersonals
Abstract: This paper provides an event-structural analysis of accusative assignment in Ukrainian and Russian impersonal predicates. Constructions in which accusative occurs in the absence of an external argument, i.e., Transitive Impersonals, are found to be necessarily dyadic and causative: one argument identifies a causing or initiating event while a second argument is associated with the verb’s core meaning. The causing event is introduced by a syntactic head within the verb’s extended functional projection that is responsible for accusative valuation, but is not argument-projecting (following Pylkkänen 2008). Event structure is thereby linked directly to Case, further elucidating the role of v in accusative valuation, and providing new evidence for event decompositional approaches to syntax. Additional support for this approach is adduced from a non-cognate impersonal construction in Russian.
2009
Contents
Articles
Mark Richard Lauersdorf
Slavic Sociolinguistics in North America: Lineage and Leading Edge 3
Ronelle Alexander and Vladimir Zhobov
New Conclusions on the Conclusive 61
Eva Eckert and Kevin Hannah
Vernacular Writing and Sociolinguistic Change in the Texas Czech Community 87
Michael Gorham
Linguistic Ideologies, Economies, and Technologies in the Language Culture of Comtemporary Russia (1987–2008) 163
Robert Greenberg
Dialects, Migrations, and Ethnic Rivalries: The Case of Bosnia-Herzegovina 193
Alla Nedashkivska
Gender Voices in Electronic Discourse: A Forum in Ukrainian 217
Aneta Pavlenko
Language Conflict in Post-Soviet Linguistic Landscapes 247
Tom Priestly, Meghan McKinnie, and Kate Hunter
The Contribution of Language Use, Language Attitudes, and Language Competence to Minority Language Maintenance: A Report from Austrian Carinthia 275
Reviews
N. Anthony Brown
Nina B. Mečkovskaja. Belorusskij jazyk: Sociolingvističeskie očerki. 317
Michael S. Flier
Laada Bilaniuk. Contested tongues: Language politics and cultural correction in Ukraine. 327
Article Abstracts
Mark Richard Lauersdorf
Slavic Sociolinguistics in North America: Lineage and Leading Edge
Abstract:This article provides a general overview of North American research in Slavic sociolinguistics from the beginnings of the field at the start of the 1960s up to the present day. The work of North American scholars published in a selection of journals, series, and special collections, as well as in monographs and dissertations, is reviewed to illustrate the research trends and the overall coverage of languages and sociolinguistic subfields as Slavic sociolinguistics developed and matured in a North American context. This study is intended to serve as a historical backdrop for the new research presented in this volume, and it closes with a brief overview of the studies in this collection and their contribution to the further development of the field.
Ronelle Alexander and Vladimir Zhobov
New Conclusions on the Conclusive
Abstract:The renarrated mood, sometimes called the “evidential”, is an innovation in Bulgarian grammar. Although it is primarily expressed with inherited forms, it includes one innovative form, a participle built on the imperfect stem of the verb. Prescriptive grammars of the socialist period stated that this participle could be used only in the meaning “renarrated”, and only without auxiliaries in the 3rd person. In the face of ample evidence that the participle is indeed used in a perfect-like compound form (i.e., with 3rd person auxiliaries), several grammarians proposed in the 1980s that this perfect-like form carried inferential meaning and should be termed the “conclusive mood”. This paper claims that the form in question is currently taking on a different, much broader meaning than either of these, and that this meaning, roughly defined as “generalized durative action in the past” is rapidly gaining acceptability among the younger generation.
Eva Eckert and Kevin Hannah
Vernacular Writing and Sociolinguistic Change in the Texas Czech Community
Abstract:This study examines the issue of language variation as characterizing the usage of an immigrant community in diaspora, specifically the Texas Czech community. It is demonstrated that the immigrants' language usage was rich and multifaceted, and that their language played a defining role in the maintenance and redefinition of ethnic and national identity. Specific features of language planning and language ideology of the Czechs and Moravians living in Texas are identified and discussed, chiefly as formulated in their press.
Michael Gorham
Linguistic Ideologies, Economies, and Technologies in the Language Culture of Comtemporary Russia (1987–2008)
Abstract:In this article I outline a theoretical and methodological framework for pursing a comprehensive study of the dominant issues and trends of Russian language culture from the Perestroika era through the present day. My chief claim is that the general shape, tone, and trajectory of a language culture will change over time and depend largely on the interdependence of three driving forces: language ideologies, economies, and technologies. To illustrate and substantiate this working hypothesis I examine both secondary theoretical sources and concrete case studies from the language culture of contemporary Russia (1987–2008).
Robert Greenberg
Dialects, Migrations, and Ethnic Rivalries: The Case of Bosnia-Herzegovina
Abstract:This article investigates the interface between dialect, ethnic identity, and political developments in the rural communities of Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the cultural and linguistic differences among Croats, Serbs, and Muslims have been most pronounced. On the basis of a fresh reanalysis of linguistic data which have previously been cited in the literature to aggrandize the differences, it is argued that the claims of Bosnia's Serb, Croat and Bosniak communities for separate identities based on the criteria of language are dubious, and that the language differences are relatively minor. It is further suggested that only certain key ethnolinguistic markers have been used to construct the notion of separate linguistic identities there.
Alla Nedashkivska
Gender Voices in Electronic Discourse: A Forum in Ukrainian
Abstract:The present study analyzes electronic discussion forums in Ukrainian from a gender linguistic perspective. First, it tests hypotheses about the egalitarian vs. hierarchical nature of electronic communication. Second, it delineates a set of genderlect features found in electronic communication in Ukrainian. Finally, based on the discourse-oriented Speech Act Empathy Hierarchy (Kuno and Kaburaki 1975/1977, Kuno 1987), the analysis demonstrates that linguistic choices signal distinct discourse orientations of females and males in electronic communication space. Namely, in mixed-gender settings, on the continuum Speaker >< Addressee >< Others, females operate more locally: Speaker >< Addressee >(< Others). Males operate with the two opposite ends of the continuum: Speaker >(< Addressee >)< Others. The analysis emphasises that both genders have a range of speech strategies that are situational; however, in some settings, males and females negotiate meaning and perceive their relationship with the addressee/others differently.
Aneta Pavlenko
Language Conflict in Post-Soviet Linguistic Landscapes
Abstract:In this article it is argued that the study of linguistic landscapes (public uses of written language) can benefit from viewing them as dynamic phenomena and examining them in a diachronic context. Based on the changes in the post-Soviet space since 1991, five processes are identified and examined in with regard to language change and language conflict. It is further argued that the study of linguistic landscape offers a useful tool for post-Soviet sociolinguistics and for Slavic sociolinguistics at large, and illustrations are provided of the insights afforded by such inquiry.
Tom Priestly, Meghan McKinnie, and Kate Hunter
The Contribution of Language Use, Language Attitudes, and Language Competence to Minority Language Maintenance: A Report from Austrian Carinthia
Abstract:During fieldwork in the Slovene-minority area of Austrian Carinthia in 1998–2000, over two hundred informants were interviewed in six localities. The interviews were designed to elicit three types of data: (i) language use in social networks, (ii) subjective perceptions of “ethnolinguistic vitality”; and (iii) linguistic competence in Standard Slovene and Standard Austrian German. The three parameters were expected to correlate with each other. This article describes the questionnaire, scoring and analysis, and demonstrates that the three parameters of attitudes, social networks, and linguistic competence are indeed correlated with each other. Several specific conclusions are reported with regard to the factors which are involved in Slovene language-maintenance in Austria.
2008
Contents
Articles
Vita G. Markman
The Case of Predicates (Revisited): Predicate Instrumental in Russian and Its Restrictions 187
Jacek Witkoś
Genitive of Negation in Polish and Single-Cycle Derivations 247
Ilse Zimmermann
On the Syntax and Semantics of kakoj and čto za in Russian 289
Reviews
Ronald Feldstein
Paul Garde. Le mot, l'accent, la phrase: études de linguistique slave et générale 307
Frank Y. Gladney
Tore Nesset. Abstract Phonology in a Concrete Model: Cognitive Linguistics and the Morphology-Phonology Interface 311
Ivona Kučerová
Mojmír Dočekal, Petr Karlík, and Jana Zmrzlíková, eds. Czech in Generative Grammar 317
Andrea D. Sims
Olga Mišeska Tomić. Balkan Sprachbund Morpho-syntactic
Features 331
Article Abstracts
Vita G. Markman
The Case of Predicates (Revisited): Predicate Instrumental in Russian and Its Restrictions
Abstract:This paper addresses the syntax of copular constructions in Russian with special attention to the prohibition on the appearance of instrumental predicates in present-tense copular constructions and their obligatory presence in argument small clauses with null predicators. I argue that copular constructions with instrumental predicates involve an eventive Pred (following Adger and Ramchand 2003), which I call “PredEv”. PredEv introduces an event argument and checks instrumental case on the predicate. In contrast, constructions with nominative predicates involve a non-eventive Pred that has no case to check. I further argue that the event argument introduced by PredEv must be licensed by Asp. However, the present-tense form of the Russian verb ‘be’ (est’) lacks the relevant aspect features. Consequently, instrumental predicates are impossible in present-tense copular constructions. In argument small clauses, on the other hand, the event argument is licensed by the Asp of the matrix verb, which makes instrumental predicates possible. In the course of the discussion I also address predicate case in adjunct small clauses and in constructions with overt predicators. Finally, I briefly compare predicate case phenomena in Russian to those in other Slavic languages.
Jacek Witkoś
Genitive of Negation in Polish and Single-Cycle Derivations
Abstract:This paper is inspired by the discussion of Genitive of Negation in Bondaruk (2004, 2005) and by an observation made in Błaszczak (2001) that, on the basis of examples such as (7) below, a construction known as Long Distance Genitive of Negation (GoN) in Polish is essentially entirely incompatible with Chomsky’s (2000, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2007) hypotheses concerning derivations proceeding in phases. We will present general conditions which a system based on single cycle syntax and phase-based derivations should meet to account for Long Distance GoN. We attempt to work Błaszczak’s critique of phase-based minimalism into a more positive set of postulates for a successful single cycle system. Another aim of this paper is to present and compare two minimalist accounts of the Genitive of Negation in Polish, the one discussed in Bondaruk (2004, 2005) and the one suggested here. First, we provide the basic set of facts that warrants the analyses that follow and refer to theoretical foundations that lead to Błaszczak’s observation. In section 3 we outline the proposal in Bondaruk (2004) and explore its virtues and weaker points. In section 4 we propose an alternative, preferable on both conceptual and empirical grounds, which is based on the notion of double probing: a relation between a single (or multiple Goal) and a double Probe, that is a Probe that consists of two adjacent heads rather than a single head. The key condition on double probing is that both Probes must be placed in the same derivational phase and no intervention effect should arise. Finally, the appendix presents a critical review of the HPSG approach to GoN proposed in Przepiórkowski 2000.
Ilse Zimmermann
On the Syntax and Semantics of kakoj and čto za in Russian
Abstract:This contribution deals with the attributive pronouns kakoj and čto za in interrogative and exclamative sentences of Russian. It is an investigation into the polyfunctionality of these expressions, their integration into the DP structure, and their interplay with sentence mood. The morphosyntactic and semantic properties of these lexical items will be considered within the framework of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program, taking into account their semantic form and conceptual structure.
Contents
Articles
Pavel Braginsky and Susan Rothstein Vendlerian
Classes and the Russian Aspectual System 3
Jovana Dimitrijević-Savić
Convergence and Attrition: Serbian in Contact with English in Australia 57
Steven Franks
Clitic Placement, Prosody, and the Bulgarian Verbal Complex 91
Nikolay Slavkov
Formal Consequences of Dative Clitic Doubling in Bulgarian Ditransitives: An Applicative Analysis 139
Reviews
Jan Fellerer
Ingrid Maier. Verbalrektion in den „Vesti-Kuranty” (1600–1660). Teil 2: Die präpositionale Rektion 167
Charles E. Townsend
František Čermák a kolektiv. Frekvenčni slovnik mluvené češtiny 177
Article Abstracts
Pavel Braginsky and Susan Rothstein
Vendlerian Classes and the Russian Aspectual System
Abstract:This paper considers the relevance of the Vendlerian lexical aspectual classification of verbs in Russian. We focus on the lexical classes of accomplishments and activities and argue that the classification of verbs into activities and accomplishments cuts across the classification into perfective and imperfective verbs. Accomplishments display incremental structure and occur as perfectives and imperfectives. Activities do not display incremental structure and also occur in the perfective and imperfective aspect. The distinction between activities and accomplishments is expressed through their interactions with what we call incremental modifiers: modifiers which are sensitive to the incremental structure of the verb meaning. These modifiers include postepenno ‘gradually’, and ‘X by X’ modifiers such as stranica za stranicej ‘page by page’ and ètaž za ètažom ‘floor by floor’. Imperfective activities do not occur with either postepenno or the ‘X by X’ modifiers, and neither do the verb forms which Padučeva 1996 calls “delimited activities” (delimitative). Accomplishments in both the imperfective and the perfective aspects occur with postepenno and the ‘X by X’ modifiers (although some Russian speakers find some examples of perfective accomplishments with ‘X by X’ modifiers unnatural owing to what we consider to be pragmatic reasons). We show that the behavior of these modifiers generally follows if we assign accomplishments the incremental structure posited in Rothstein 2004 and treat the modifiers as directly modifying the incremental structure.
Jovana Dimitrijević-Savić
Convergence and Attrition: Serbian in Contact with English in Australia
Abstract:The aim of this paper is to examine features resulting from language contact under conditions of language shift in a variety of Serbian spoken in a migrant community in Melbourne, Australia. Three categories of change are proposed: (i) change that makes Serbian more similar to English without simplifying it, exemplified by the resetting of the pro-drop parameter; (ii) change that simplifies the structures of Serbian without making them more similar to English, exemplified by leveling within the verbal inflectional paradigm and dropping of the 3sg auxiliary clitic je; and (iii) change that both simplifies the structures of Serbian and makes them more like English, exemplified by leveling within the nominal inflectional paradigm, use of full pronominal forms following the verb rather than clitic pronominal forms in second position, and placement of verbal auxiliary clitics and the reflexive clitic se.
Steven Franks
Clitic Placement, Prosody, and the Bulgarian Verbal Complex
Abstract:This paper compares competing ways of understanding the fact that clitics but nothing else freely and necessarily intervene between the two verbal heads in Bulgarian compound tenses of the type [participle + (clitics +) auxiliary]. These involve a participle fronted for focus reasons. The problem is then how the clitics get in the middle. I argue that prosodic and morphological approaches are not adequate, nor is any PF-filtering necessitated. Instead, the complex head structure [[participle + clitics] + [auxiliary]] must be created syntactically, with the participle adjoining to the clitics before the resulting complex adjoins to the auxiliary.
Nikolay Slavkov
Formal Consequences of Dative Clitic Doubling in Bulgarian Ditransitives: An Applicative Analysis
Abstract:This paper demonstrates that the Double Object Construction exists in Bulgarian, a fact that has so far escaped notice due to the disguise in which the construction appears. Bulgarian is a language that allows an indirect object to be optionally doubled by a dative clitic. I claim, however, that this optionality has formal consequences: ditransitives with dative clitic doubling are equivalent to Double Object Constructions (DOC), where the DP Goal is projected higher than the DP Theme. Variants without dative clitic doubling, on the other hand, are Prepositional Ditransitive Constructions (PDC), where the DP Theme is projected higher than the PP Goal. Although not evident from the surface word order and morphology in Bulgarian, the availability of these two distinct structures is confirmed through classic diagnostics such as binding, weak crossover, and scope. After attesting the DOC in Bulgarian, I offer an analysis in which the dative clitic is the morphological realization of an applicative head. I also draw parallels with Romance, suggesting that UG may be implicated in this type of doubling.
2007
Contents
Special Issue on Phonology
Articles
Christina Y. Bethin
Word Prosody in the Vladimir-Volga Basin Dialects of Russian 177
Małgorzata E. Ćavar
[ATR] in Polish 207
Anna Łubowicz
Paradigmatic Contrast in Polish 229
Beata Łukaszewicz and Monika Opalińska
How Abstract are Children’s Representations? Evidence from Polish 263
Jaye Padgett and Marzena Żygis
The Evolution of Sibilants in Polish and Russian 291
Jerzy Rubach
A Conspiracy of Gliding Processes in Polish 325
Article Abstracts
Christina Y. Bethin
Word Prosody in the Vladimir-Volga Basin Dialects of Russian
Abstract:In the archaic dialects of the Vladimir-Volga Basin dialect group, the immediately pretonic vowel constitutes a strong position that is equal or superior to that comprising the stressed syllable. These dialects have increased vowel duration in the tonic and immediately pretonic syllables and a fixed rising-falling pitch contour over the two. Because these dialects generally have vowel reduction elsewhere, the special properties of the pretonic syllable are particularly intriguing. Recent research on vowel reduction/neutralization in Russian (Crosswhite 1999/2001, Barnes 2002, 2006, Padgett and Tabain 2005, Padgett 2004) does not systematically deal with this type of word prosody. The Vladimir-Volga Basin dialects form part of the Central Russian dialect group where the immediately pretonic position in general has special status. I argue that the peculiar prosody of the archaic Vladimir-Volga Basin dialects is due to the presence of both stress and tone in their phonology. Pretonic duration is a consequence of mapping a high tone (H) and a pitch rise to the pitch peak in that syllable. There is some evidence to suggest that this type of word prosody is older than the stress prosody of Contemporary Standard Russian (CSR), and it may represent a stage in the transformation of the Common Slavic (CS) pitch accent system to an East Slavic (ES) stress-based one.
Małgorzata E. Ćavar
[ATR] in Polish
Abstract:The feature [ATR] is usually used exclusively for the description of vowels. In this article, it is argued that phonotactic constraints in Polish indicate that [ATR] may be a useful dimension in the description of consonants. Under this assumption we are able to offer a straightforward and phonetically motivated account of the discussed phonotactic constraints and relate them to palatalization processes in Polish. The consequence of the assumption that [ATR] is a consonantal dimension is a reanalysis of some palatalization processes in terms of [ATR] and the identification of the need for a new typology of palatalization processes.
Anna Łubowicz
Paradigmatic Contrast in Polish
Abstract:This paper examines allomorph distribution in the locative of masculine and neuter nouns in Polish. Locative allomorph distribution is opaque and is accounted for in terms of preserving contrast. The key idea is that the different allomorphs of the locative suffix keep apart forms that the regular phonology would otherwise neutralize. This contributes to the body of work on morphological opacity and the role for paradigmatic contrast.
Beata Łukaszewicz and Monika Opalińska
How Abstract are Children’s Representations? Evidence from Polish
Abstract:This paper investigates the issue of the abstractness of children’s underlying representations, focusing on the acquisition of a complex morphophonological system. The data from three Polish-speaking children exhibit regular alternations which are caused both by adult-based processes already acquired, as well as child-specific processes triggered or blocked in the variable phonetic environment of derivational and inflectional morphemes. The interplay between child-specific and adult-based processes within an individual system, opacity effects, and, generally, phonological behavior of segments reveal adult-like distinctions and point to abstract adult-like representations based on morphophonological alternations rather than directly on adult surface forms.
Jaye Padgett and Marzena Żygis
The Evolution of Sibilants in Polish and Russian
Abstract:This paper provides an explanation for a sound change affecting Polish by which palatalized palatoalveolars became retroflexes. An extension of the account to a similar (but probably independent) Russian sound change is also considered. We argue that the sound change was motivated by the needs of perceptual distinctiveness within a rich sibilant inventory and provide an analysis within the framework of Dispersion Theory. This analysis is further supported by a typological survey and by phonetic data. This case study supports the view that “unconditioned” sound changes, and allophonic rules resulting from them, can be motivated by contrast, and further shows that the notion of dispersion in phonology can be usefully applied to consonants.
Jerzy Rubach
A Conspiracy of Gliding Processes in Polish
Abstract:One of the significant consequences of the autosegmental theory of representations is a different way of drawing the distinction between glides and vowels. The distinction is made in terms of syllable structure rather than in terms of the feature [±syllabic], as was the case in SPE phonology. This article pursues the problem of the glide-vowel distinction for Polish and shows that with few exceptions this distinction is derivable from distributional generalizations. The generalizations are first stated in terms of rules and then reanalyzed in terms of OT constraints. It is argued that the OT-based analysis is superior to the rule-based analysis.
Contents
Articles
Caroline Féry, Alla Paslawska, and Gisbert Fanselow
Nominal Split Constructions in Ukrainian 3
Lydia Grebenyova
Sluicing in Slavic 49
Arthur Stepanov
On the Absence of Long-Distance A-Movement in Russian 81
Ivelina K. Tchizmarova
Bulgarian Verbs of Change of Location 109
Reviews
Michael K. Launer
Marjorie J. McShane. A Theory of Ellipsis 149
Ian Press
A.M. Mordovan, S.S. Skorvid, A.A. Kibrik, N.V. Rogova, E.I. Jakuškina, A.F. Žuravlev, and S.M. Tolstaja, eds. Jazyki mira: Slavjanskie jazyki 163
Milorad Radovanović
Nedžad Leko, ed. Lingvistički vidici 167
Charles Townsend
Iván Igartua Origen y evolución de la flexión nominal eslava 171
Article Abstracts
Caroline Féry, Alla Paslawska, and Gisbert Fanselow
Nominal Split Constructions in Ukrainian
Abstract:Discontinuous (or split) nominal and prepositional constructions are extremely productive in Ukrainian. In split constructions, the head and the noun dependents are separated by lexical material which does not belong to the nominal or prepositional phrase. Ukrainian, like other Slavic languages, has free word order, a flexible intonation, and no obligatory articles—three properties that are decisive for the emergence of split constructions. The paper focuses on the role played by information-structure and intonation. A distinction is made between cohesive intonation, in which both parts of the split construction are uttered in a single intonation phrase, and non-cohesive intonation, in which the two parts of the splits are in separate intonation phrases. A cohesive intonation favors so-called simple splits in which the order of the constituents is respected, whereas a non-cohesive intonation typically (but not necessarily) correlates with inverted splits, where the order of the constituents differs from the canonical one. Both types of splits are triggered by an asymmetric information-structure: the two parts of the discontinuous phrase are separated from each other because they bear different information-structural features, like topic, focus, and givenness.
Lydia Grebenyova
Sluicing in Slavic
Abstract:The goal of this paper is to explore the properties of sluicing (i.e., clausal ellipsis) in Slavic languages. In turn, we will see how the Slavic data shed light on the nature of general processes underlying sluicing. First, I determine what positions wh-remnants occupy in sluicing constructions in Slavic, given the properties of wh--movement in each language. Contrary to the standard analyses, where an interrogative +wh- complementizer licenses TP-ellipsis, I argue that it is actually the +focus feature that is responsible for licensing sluicing in Slavic. The proposal is further extended to languages other than Slavic. I also demonstrate how the interpretation of multiple interrogatives in a given language affects the availability of multiple sluicing (i.e., sluicing with multiple wh--remnants) in that language. Finally, I explore a surprising manifestation of Superiority effects in sluicing structures in languages that do not exhibit Superiority effects in non-elliptical structures. I derive those Superiority effects from an independent property of ellipsis, namely, scope parallelism.
Arthur Stepanov
On the Absence of Long-Distance A-Movement in Russian
Abstract:Lasnik (1998) observes that Russian lacks long-distance subject-to-object and subject-to-subject raising, where “long-distance” is understood in the sense of crossing the boundary of a clausal domain defined in terms of an independent Infl (Tense/Agreement) system. In Lasnik’s terms, this state of affairs arises because Russian infinitival clauses are necessarily Tensed, whereas English infinitivals (which do allow long-distance raising) may appear “tenseless.” In this article I discuss examples of raising with aspectual and modal predicates in Russian, whose grammaticality appears to call into question the validity of Lasnik’s claim and show that raising in these contexts is in fact limited to a single TP domain. Realizing the monoclausal character of raising removes the apparent challenge to Lasnik’s generalization and reaffirms the radically “local” behavior of Russian in the domain of A-movement.
Ivelina K. Tchizmarova
Bulgarian Verbs of Change of Location
Abstract: Bulgarian verbs that denote change of location divide the space of linear motion in specific ways. Otivam ‘go’, a source-and-path oriented verb (Fillmore 1983), entails movement away from a starting point along a path. Associated adverbs and PPs express its goal or purpose. Idvam (perfective dojda ) ‘come’, a path-and-goal oriented verb, entails movement along a path towards a goal at the speaker’s or listener’s location (deictic center). Zaminavam and trâgvam , both glossed as ‘leave’, are source-oriented verbs, which have movement away from starting point/source at departure time, t1, coded in their meaning. With zaminavam , t1 is extended to include preparation prior to departure, while with trâgvam it is not. Xodja and vârvja , roughly ‘walk’, are path-oriented verbs denoting the homogenous activity of traversing a path. Both can refer to movement on foot, but normally only vârvja can refer to movement of vehicles. Pristigam ‘arrive’ is a goal-oriented verb which entails arrival at the goal, often at specific arrival time, t2. Elements of motion not coded in verbal meanings, e.g., the source of idvam , may be specified by PPs or AdvPs.
2006
Contents
Special Issue on Slavic Languages in Émigré Contexts
From the Guest Editors 161
Olga Kagan
Introduction: The Language Norm and Language Attrition from a Pedagogical Perspective 163
Articles
David R. Andrews
The Role of Émigré Russian in Redefining the “Standard” 169
Maria Polinsky
Incomplete Acquisition: American Russian 191
Elena Schmitt
The “Bare Bones” of Language Attrition 263
Larisa Leisiö
Genitive Subjects and Objects in the Speech of Finland Russians 289
Article Abstracts
David R. Andrews
The Role of Émigré Russian in Redefining the “Standard”
Abstract: Despite minor disagreements over a very few specific features and recognized differences between the formal and colloquial registers, “correct” or “proper” Russian was a fixed concept during the Soviet era. It was “russkij literaturnyj jazyk” (the Russian literary language) or, in the terminology of American Slavists, “Contemporary Standard Russian” (CSR). Here I argue that the post-Soviet Russian of educated speakers is evolving into a “negative dialect,” a term coined by Millward (1988) to describe General American. A negative dialect is characterized not so much by the specific features that it has but by the identifiably regional or nonnormative ones that it lacks. However, because it permits a greater degree of internal variation than strict prescriptivist models, it often stigmatizes major norm violations even more than a traditional standard language. I call this emerging dialect “Educated Mainstream Russian” and make my case for it by comparing and contrasting developments in émigré-Russian versus mainstream-Russian lexicon, semantics, phonology, prosody, morphology and syntax.
Maria Polinsky
Incomplete Acquisition: American Russian
Abstract: This paper has two main goals: (i) to provide a description of the language of incomplete learners of Russian living in the U.S. and (ii) to identify across-the-board differences between a full language and an incompletely learned language. Most data used here come from American Russian, a reduced and reanalyzed version of Russian spoken in the U.S. by those speakers who became English-dominant in childhood. Incomplete acquirers of Russian demonstrate significant intra-group variation, which corresponds to similar variation found among incomplete learners of other languages. However, there are a number of structural properties that are shared by American Russian speakers regardless of their proficiency level and that distinguish their language from the baseline variety of Russian. American Russian therefore cannot be defined solely on geographical grounds; it differs significantly from varieties of Russian spoken by subjects who maintain language competence appropriate to uninterrupted acquisition. The paper also demonstrates a correlation between vocabulary deficiency and gaps in the grammar of American Russian. Such a correlation suggests a compact method of estimating incomplete acquirers’ proficiency based on a concise lexical test.
Elena Schmitt
The “Bare Bones” of Language Attrition
Abstract: This study focuses on the analysis of bare forms that are discussed in terms of composite code-switching, i.e., code-switching that involves convergence at one or more levels of abstract lexical structure. The analysis of the young immigrants’ free production indicates that Russian is the Matrix Language that sets the grammatical frame, whereas English is responsible for supplying some of the content and early system morphemes. The study shows that all major speech categories that participate in code-switching may be used as bare forms. The mechanism that underlies the formation of bare forms is hypothesized to be the same for nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
Larisa Leisiö
Genitive Subjects and Objects in the Speech of Finland Russians
Abstract: The paper considers genitive marking in subjects and objects in Finland Russian. Finnish interference in the speech of Finland Russians is shown to favor patterns common to Finland Russian and Standard Russian and to promote the retention and quantitative extension of marked shared patterns in the subordinate language. Interference affecting qualitative change in subordinate-language patterns is also discussed.
Contents
Articles
David Hart Cognitive
Events in the Development of the Russian Suppletive Pair god – let ‘year’ 3
Vsevolod Kapatsinski
Sex Associations of Russian Generics 17
Nerea Madariaga
Why Russian Semi-Predicative Items Always Agree 45
Reviews
Ronelle Alexander
Robert Greenberg. Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and its Disintegration 79
Alina Israeli
Alan Timberlake. A Reference Grammar of Russian 91
Franc Marušič and Rok Žaucer
Janez Orešnik and Donald D. Reindl, eds. Slovenian from a typological perspective (Sprachtypologie und Universalien¬ forschung (Language typology and universals)) 123
Article Abstracts
David Hart
Cognitive Events in the Development of the Russian Suppletive Pair god – let ‘year’
Abstract: The semantic development of the suppletive pair god – let ‘year’ was due to a specific communicative deficiency that arose among speakers of Old Russian as a result of the adoption of Christianity in Rus’ and to metonymical devices that were triggered in answer to the perceived expressive want. These devices were authorized by a general constraint of compatibility on the shift of meaning from source to target. Suppletion developed as a result of the incompatibility of some aspects of the newly polysemous godъ and numerical quantification.
Vsevolod Kapatsinski
Sex Associations of Russian Generics
Abstract: This article explores whether Russian generic nouns and pronouns have sex associations, what factors influence the formation of sex associations, and whether ways for changing sexist language developed by American feminists are viable for Russian, as well as whether such change is currently likely. Social implications of the data are also explored.
Nerea Madariaga
Why Russian Semi-Predicative Items Always Agree
Abstract: In this paper an explanation is provided for the fact that the Russian semi-predicative items odin ‘one, alone’ and sam ‘-self, same’ must obligatorily undergo Case Agreement (i.e., they must show up in the same case as the argument they refer to) and that unlike regular predicatives they cannot check instrumental case. It is argued that this fact is due to the quantificational nature of these items. My analysis is based on a “predicational” analysis of the semi-predicatives odin and sam as the head of a QP inserted in an apposition adjoined to V' or Pred'. Semi-predicatives cannot be assigned inherent instrumental case there because Pred0 [+inst] can only select an AP or NP (but not a QP or DP). In particular, it is argued that the quantificational nature of these items relates them not only to predicatives but also to some adverbs and to regular quantifiers.
2005
Contents
Articles
Joanna Błaszczak
On the Nature of N-Words in Polish 173
Francis Butler
Russian vurdalak ‘vampire’ and Related Forms in Slavic 237
Brian Cooper
The Word vampire: Its Slavonic From and Origin 251
George M. Cummins
Literary Czech, Common Czech, and the Instrumental Plural 271
Edit Jakab
Noncanonical Uses of Russian Imperatives 299
Review
Donald Reindl
Stefan Michael Newerkla. Sprachkontakte Deutsch-Tschechisch-Slowakisch 359
Joanna Błaszczak
On the Nature of N-Words in Polish
Abstract: This paper examines the nature of so-called n-words in Polish, i.e., (morphologically) negative expressions of the type nikt ‘nobody’, nic ‘nothing’ which participate in Negative Concord structures. Two main questions discussed in the paper are: (i) Do such expressions have an inherently negative meaning? and (ii) Do they have an inherent quantificational force? Both of these questions are answered negatively. As for the first question, it is argued that n-words in Polish—despite being morphologically negative—are semantically nonnegative elements. They are interpreted as negative though, because they (always) cooccur with the sentential negation marker nie ‘not’. In this respect n-words in Polish resemble more Negative Polarity Items like any than negative quantifiers like nobody. Like the former, but unlike the latter, Polish n-words—in order to be properly interpreted (i.e., to be grammatical)—must be licensed by an appropriate licenser (here, negation). As for the second question, it is argued at length that Polish n-words cannot be treated as universal quantifiers. It is shown that an analysis of n-words in the sense of Giannakidou 1998, according to which Negative Concord terms are taken to be universal quantifiers that—in order to be properly interpreted—always have to move at LF via Quantifier Raising to a scope position above negation, leads to a number of empirical and theoretical problems. On the contrary, there is ample evidence showing that n-words in Polish have indefinite nature, i.e., they behave like other indefinites in Polish. Since indefinite elements themselves might be analyzed in terms of existential quantifiers or in terms of nonquantificational elements in the sense of Heim 1982, additional evidence is provided to show that n-words in Polish are in fact best treated as nonquantificational elements. In sum, the paper argues that n-words in Polish are nonnegative nonquantificational indefinite elements. Another issue commented on in this paper is the question of the reliability of some tests being extensively used in the literature as evidence for the universal quantifier status of the tested elements.
Article Abstracts
Francis Butler
Russian vurdalak ‘vampire’ and Related Forms in Slavic
Abstract: The paper adduces strong evidence that Russian vurdalak (‘vampire’) entered the language thanks to Puškin, who formed it from models in the work of Prosper Mérimée and Lord Byron. It also surveys the distribution of related forms in Slavic and suggests that the Croatian surname Vrdoljak may not be related to any of them. These conclusions have significant consequences for a hypothesis of Johanna Nichols regarding the ultimate Iranian origin of vurdalak and related forms.
Brian Cooper
The Word "vampire": Its Slavonic From and Origin
Abstract: After an examination of some of the historical and linguistic background to the word vampire, including its links with the purity of the earth, a new etymology is proposed for the word based on Common Slavonic borrowing from Dacian Latin and interborrowing of words within the Balkans Sprachbund.
George M. Cummins
Literary Czech, Common Czech, and the Instrumental Plural
Abstract: The gap between spoken Czech and the stylized literary language spisovná čeština is so great that in categories such as the instrumental plural of all nominals the prestige code desinences are bookish or archaic while in the spoken code they are nonstandard and colloquial; no neutral register exists. Instr pl noun phrases (modifier plus noun) are among the most marked in colloquial morphology as they have both nonstandard theme vowels and a nonstandard case-marking vowel. Nonetheless they are fully established in all supraregional spoken forms of Czech, Common Czech of Bohemia, Moravian interdialects, and Lach. Unlike one-dimensional morphological markings such as the loc pl in –ách in velar stems, they cannot be recognized in the prestige code. The hierarchical differentiation of these forms is analyzed in the wider context of other colloquial morphological features. It is argued that in code mixing or code switching all varieties of nonstandard morphology make their way into formal speech not as mere stylistic coloration but as agents of discourse function. Contemporary writers such as Hrabal in Příliš hlučná samota make selective functional use of colloquial morphology for thematic focus.
Edit Jakab
Noncanonical Uses of Russian Imperatives
Abstract not available
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.
2004
Contents
Articles
Steven Franks, Uwe Junghanns, and Paul Law
Pronomial Clitics in Slavic 3
Željko Bošković
Clitic Placement in South Slavic 39
Andrew Caink
Semi-Lexical Heads and Clitic Climbing 95
Denisa Lenertova
Czech Pronominal Clitics 139
Sandra Stjepanovi
Clitic Climbing and Restructuring with "Finite Clause" and Infinitive Complements 177
Olga Miš eska Tomić
The South Slavic Pronominal Clitics 213
Archive
Wayles Browne
Serbo-Croatian Enclitics for English-Speaking Learners 251
Reviews
Loren A. Billings
Željko Bošković. On the Nature of the Syntax-Phonology Interface: Cliticization and Related Phenomena 285
Article Abstracts
Steven Franks, Uwe Junghanns, and Paul Law
Pronomial Clitics in Slavic
Abstract not available
Željko Bošković
Clitic Placement in South Slavic
Abstract: The paper examines clitic placement and the nature of clitic clustering in Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian. It is argued that Serbo-Croatian clitics do not cluster syntactically; they are located in different projections in the syntax. The order of clitics within the clitic cluster is argued to follow from the hierarchical arrangement of projections in which they are located. The paper also provides a principled account of the idiosyncratic behavior of the auxiliary clitic je, which in contrast to other auxiliary clitics follows pronominal clitics. In contrast to Serbo-Croatian clitics, Bulgarian and Macedonian clitics are argued to cluster in the same head position in the final syntactic representation. The cluster is formed through successive cyclic leftward adjunctions of clitics to the verb, in accordance with the LCA. Following Chomsky’s (1994) suggestion that clitics are ambiguous head/phrasal elements, it is argued that clitics do not branch, hence cannot take complements. This claim leads to a new proposal concerning the structural representation of several clitic forms.
Andrew Caink
Semi-Lexical Heads and Clitic Climbing
Abstract: A unified analysis of "clitic climbing” from subordinate clauses in Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian and from DP in Czech is presented. Such clitic placement is demonstrated to co-occur with a semi-lexical head, and several apparently lexical Czech nouns are shown to have semi-lexical status. The definition of an "extended projection” is made contingent upon a theory of variable lexicalization, enabling a semi-lexical head to optionally occur within the extended projection of a lower lexical head. This option allows the pronominal clitic in both constructions to appear higher in the tree, while not violating the single structural relation between any pronominal clitic and its associated theta-assigned position
Denisa Lenertova
Czech Pronominal Clitics
Abstract: This article explores the empirical properties of Czech pronominal clitics, which differ from their counterparts in other second position (2P) clitic languages (such as Serbian-Croatian) in a number of respects. After looking at clitic-first and clitic-third phenomena and their semantic/pragmatic impact, it is argued that Czech clitic placement must be basically driven by syntax, and that the 2P is a heterogeneous structure in which pronominal clitics occupy a TP-external position below clitic auxiliaries, but higher than the copula. The linear ordering of pronominal clitics within their cluster has a certain limited flexibility due to phonological requirements, which affect both monoclausal clitic placement and clitic climbing. Finally, the empirical details of clitic climbing in Czech are discussed, showing that it cannot be reduced to movement for case checking or to the phenomenon of restructuring known from Romance languages.
Sandra Stjepanovi
Clitic Climbing and Restructuring with "Finite Clause" and Infinitive Complements
Abstract not available
Olga Miš eska Tomić
The South Slavic Pronominal Clitics
Abstract not available
2003
Contents
Articles
Anna Bondaruk
Parasitic Gaps and ATB in Polish 221
Ronald Feldstein
The Unified Monophthongization Rule of Common Slavic 251
Tore Nesset
The Assignment of Gender and Declension to Russian Nouns in Soft consonants: Predictability and Rule Interaction 287
Geoffrey Schwartz
The Lemkos' Affricates: Phonetic, Perceptual, and Sociolinguistics Implications 323
Reviews
Gregory P. Christiansen
Parameters of Slavic Aspect: A Cognitive Approach 347
Bogdan Horbal
Gramatyka języka łemkowskiego 361
Robert Orr
Old Church Slavonic Grammar 365
Peter Sgall
Register Variation and Language Standards in Czech 375
Article Abstracts
Anna Bondaruk
Parasitic Gaps and ATB in Polish
Abstract: The paper examines ATB and parasitic gap structures in Polish in order to determine whether they can be conflated into a single phenomenon. Three available approaches to these two constructions are outlined and evaluated as to their applicability to Polish data. It is argued that the approach postulating the treatment of parasitic gaps as a special case of ATB put forward by Huybregts and van Riemsdijk (1985) and Williams (1990) is problematic as it does not specify how parasitic gap constructions are assigned the coordinate status. The second approach arguing in favor of subsuming ATB gaps under parasitic gaps, advocated by Munn (1992) and Franks (1993, 1995), is more advantageous. Franks’s analysis is scrutinized in detail, as it directly deals with Polish. It is argued that there exist ATB and parasitic gaps which violate both Franks’s thematic prominence condition and his case identity requirement. It is suggested that mere morphological case identity is not sufficient and should be supplemented with identity in abstract Case, perhaps along the lines of Dyła (1984). Next, we examine the third approach, proposed by Postal (1993), suggesting that parasitic gaps and ATB gaps do not represent a single phenomenon and therefore should be kept separate. It is pointed out that the differences between Polish parasitic gaps and ATB gaps are not uniquely characteristic for these two types of structure and that is why they cannot serve as sufficient evidence for claiming that the two examined constructions are instances of distinct phenomena. A conclusion along these lines is reached independently by Hornstein and Nunes (2002) on the basis of English and Portuguese data. Their analysis generally turns out to be applicable also to Polish ATB and parasitic gaps, and only the sentences where case mismatch occurs or where thematic prominence is violated require a separate explanation.
Ronald Feldstein
The Unified Monophthongization Rule of Common Slavic
Abstract: The goal of this paper is to show that the Common Slavic monophthongization of diphthongs was a much more uniform process than has been thought. There are two main types of rules, depending on whether the two moraic components of the diphthong have a pure sonority contrast (± consonantal or ± high) or a sonority contrast in addition to one of nasality or front/back. In the case of the pure sonority contrast, one of the input moras becomes the moraic unit of the new two-mora monophthong. The question of whether it is the first or second mora depends on the sonority distance between the diphthongal components; in the unmarked case of lesser sonority distance, the second component is generalized in the monophthong, but a greater sonority distance causes the first component to become the moraic unit of the monophthong. When the diphthongal contrast involves sonority plus nasality or front/back, the non-nasal or back component first experiences assimilation to nasality or frontness and then serves as the moraic model for the resulting monophthong. These two basic rule types can be readily applied to both glide and nasal diphthongs, with the proviso that non-high vowels must be considered low (ä, a), rather than the traditionally assumed mid vowels (e, o). However, in the case of liquid diphthongs, there is an important difference of relative chronology between southern and northern zones. Southern zones experience the change of short vowels to mid only after the monophthongization of liquid diphthongs, while the northern zones first undergo the change of short vowel > mid, and only then monophthongize the liquid diphthongs. The presence of unchanged low and high vowels (*tart and *turt) accounts for the southern reflexes, while the new mid vowel combinations of the North (*tort and *tərt) account for the northern results. Thus, virtually all of the diphthongal reflexes of Slavic can be explained by: 1) recognizing differing monophthongization rules for pure sonority contrasts, as contrasted with sonority in combination with nasality or front/back; and 2) recognizing the differing northern and southern relative chronologies for monophthongization and short vowel > mid in the last set of diphthongs to monophthongize, which are the liquids.
Tore Nesset
The Assignment of Gender and Declension to Russian Nouns in Soft Consonants: Predictability and Rule Interaction
Abstract: This paper investigates the predictability of gender and declension of Russian nouns ending in soft consonants. It is argued that morphologically complex nouns and nouns denoting animates show nearly full predictability. For simplex inanimate nouns, clear statistical tendencies are documented based on stress patterns and the quality of the penultimate and final segments of the stem. In addition to explicating morphological, semantic, and phonological generalizations, the paper offers a detailed investigation of their interaction, for which an assignment hierarchy is advanced. The assignment of gender and declension is shown to be systematic and well behaved in that highly ranked generalizations consistently take precedence over those further down.
Geoffrey Schwartz
The Lemkos' Affricates: Phonetic, Perceptual, and Sociolinguistic Implications
Abstract: The Lemkos are one of a number of Ruthenian peoples inhabiting the Carpathian mountains. Their language belongs to the group of Southwest Ukrainian dialects. In the late 1940s, immediately following the second World War, most of the Lemkos were forced to abandon their homeland in the Beskid Niski, a Carpathian range between the Tatras and the Bieszczady, which forms part of the border between Poland and Slovakia. Many of them were sent to areas in Western Poland that had been part of Germany before the war, while the rest ended up in the Soviet Union. In the past couple of decades, many Lemkos have returned to the Beskid Niski. While the speech of the Lemkos before World War II was well documented in the works of Zdzisław Stieber, this author is unaware of any works examining the linguistic effects of their resettlement in Polish-speaking areas. This paper provides an acoustic phonetic characterization of the Lemkos’ voiceless affricates both in their own dialect and when they speak Polish, focusing on the distinction between the palato-alveolar /tʃ/ and the alveolo-palatal /tɕ/. An examination of the dental affricate [ts] is added for descriptive purposes, but this segment remains outside the contrast under study. The paper will go on to discuss the perceptual implications of the contrast, variation among speakers, and related sociolinguistic implications.
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Contents
Special Issue on Semantics
Articles
Olga Babko-Malaya
Perfectivity and Prefixation in Russian 5
Barbara Citko
On the Syntax and Semantics of English and Polish Concessive Conditionals 37
Hana Filip
Prefixes and the Delimitation of Events 55
Svetlana Godjevac
Quantifier Scope and LF Movement in Serbo-Croatian 103
Eva Hajičová, Jiří Havelka, and Petr Sgall
Discourse Semantics and the Salience of Referents 127
Svetlana McCoy
Pronoun Doubling and Quantification in Colloquial Russian 141
Larissa Naiditch
Is There an "ANTICAUSATIVE" Component in the Semantics of Decausatives? 161
Elena Paducheva
The Communicative Effects of the Interaction between the Verbal Aspectual Categories and Temporal Adverbials in Russian 173
Tanya Yanko
Whither or Where: Case Choice and Verbs of Placement in Contemporary Ukrainian 199
Article Abstracts
Olga Babko-Malaya
Perfectivity and Prefixation in Russian
Abstract: This paper proposes an analysis of perfectivity in Russian, which aims to answer the following questions: (1) Why are perfective verbs usually prefixed in Russian? (2) Which classes of prefixed verbs have a compositional meaning, i.e., one predictable from the prefix-verb combination? (3) Which classes of prefixed verbs preserve the selectional restrictions of the corresponding unprefixed verbs? (4) Which classes of perfective verbs take internal arguments obligatorily and why? The analysis proposed in the paper assumes that perfective verbs are derived by affixation of Dowty-style aspectual operators CAUSE and BECOME, and optionally a prefix. Perfective verbs under this analysis vary in their morphological structures, as well as in the syntactic position of the prefix. Different behavior of different classes of perfective verbs is accounted for as a consequence of their compositional interpretation.
Barbara Citko
On the Syntax and Semantics of English and Polish Concessive Conditionals
Abstract: This paper presents a comparative analysis of English and Polish concessive conditionals. In English, concessive conditionals typically involve whatever or no matter what adjunct clauses. In Polish, however, they involve subjunctive mood and what looks like pleonastic negation. The main question addressed in this paper is how, in view of these differences, we can account for the parallelism in interpretation between English and Polish concessives. The analysis developed here shows that the subjunctive mood and negation in Polish combine in a way that yields a semantic contribution similar to the contribution of ever in English.
Hana Filip
Refixes and the Delimitation of Events
Abstract not available
Svetlana Godjevac
Quantifier Scope and LF Movement in Serbo-Croatian
Abstract: Despite a strong correlation between word order and quantifier scope interpretation, Serbo-Croatian cannot rely only on S-structure for quantifier scope interpretation. A level distinct from S-structure, such as LF, and an operation such as LF movement is necessary. Evidence for this position is adduced from inverse scope readings. The lack of quantifier scope ambiguity in some examples does not justify the claim that Serbo-Croatian has no LF movement, but it does reveal something important about the interpretation of DPs in Serbo-Croatian: Serbo-Croatian prefers topical interpretation of left-most DPs in null contexts.
Eva Hajičová, Jiří Havelka, and Petr Sgall
Discourse Semantics and the Salience of Referents
Abstract: A major issue in the analysis of discourse patterns is identification of the reference of coreferring expressions in consecutive utterances. The relevant questions may be approached from the viewpoint of the degrees of salience of the referents and of the development of these degrees during a discourse. We want to show how an account of salience may use the opposition of word tokens (and their underlying counterparts) occurring as contextually bound (in the topic) or non-bound (in the focus).
Svetlana McCoy
Pronoun Doubling and Quantification in Colloquial Russian
Abstract: His paper examines semantic factors that facilitate pronoun doubling in colloquial Russian. The pronoun doubling (of subjects and/or objects) is not allowed in sentences with stage-level predicates. Among constructions that facilitate this phenomenon are sentences with individual-level predicates, the universal quantifier or quantifiers like most, contrastive foci, semantic operators like even and only, and wh-questions. It is proposed that these constructions share the following semantic property: their quantificational structure involves some type of multiplicity. The multiplicity comes from either a complex event structure (sentences with ILPs, quantifiers like all or most) or from a set of alternatives that is introduced into the discourse (contrastive foci, operators like even, wh-words, etc.)
Larissa Naiditch
Is There an "ANTICAUSATIVE" Component in the Semantics of Decausatives?
Abstract: The subject of this paper is the semantics of noun phrases (adjective+noun combinations) used in Soviet Russian political discourse. The study has the following objectives: 1) to reveal the semantics of certain types of noun phrases, and the internal relations in them, i.e., the laws and patterns of their formation; 2) to investigate the pragmatic value of these word groups; 3) to contribute to the investigation of general peculiarities of Soviet political discourse. It will be demonstrated that the adjectives under discussion are similar to epitheta ornantia used in traditional texts, especially in folklore. The concept of tautological epithets can be applied to the word groups under consideration because of the proximity or even the coincidence of semantic contents of the noun and the adjective within the noun phrase. The adjective often serves here as an intensifier or qualifier, the classificative function of attribute being absent. The evaluation can be contained in each element of the word group or in both of them. The abundance of such adjectives is a striking feature of Soviet political discourse. They contribute to a certain "monumentalism” of text and provide a ready value judgement of events, the judgement prevailing over the informative content of the texts.
Elena Paducheva
The Communicative Effects of the Interaction between the Verbal Aspectual Categories and Temporal Adverbials in Russian
Abstract: In this paper Russian decausatives are claimed to be formed from those causative verbs that allow non-agentive subjects, so that the main difference between decausatives and passives is that a decausative excludes participation of a volitional Agent in the concept of the situation. Decausativization is presented as a shift of diathesis, which transfers the Object of a causative verb (with non-agentive subject) to the Subject position but preserves the Causer as an adjunct. The adjunct Causer, if not specified and thus irrelevant, may be deleted by means of a rule analogous to that responsible, e.g., for Unspecified Object deletion. The "Anticausative” analysis of decausatives, according to which decausatives denote a change that can take place spontaneously, is rejected: it is demonstrated that spontaneity of change is not an obligatory feature in the semantics of decausatives.
Tanya Yanko
The Communicative Effects of the Interaction between the Verbal Aspectual Categories and Temporal Adverbials in Russian
Abstract: In the context of the verbal aspectual forms referring to the situations which came to an end before the moment of speaking, the Russian adverbial davno ‘long ago’ is always the rheme of the sentence. The rhematic bias of davno is accounted for by the semantic parameter ‘remote in time from the speaker’. Meanwhile, in the context of the verbal aspectual forms referring to the situations which persist up to and including the moment of speaking, davno is not obligatorily the rheme. Another semantic parameter which influences the theme-rheme structure is the meaning ‘below the norm’. The parameter ‘below the norm’ determines the communicative function of the Russian adverbial nedavno ‘recently’: it is the rheme in the context of the verbal forms which refer to situations taking place over a long period of time. Thus, I hope to demonstrate that whether an adverbial belongs to the theme of a sentence or it can solely be the rheme may depend on the meaning of the verbal categories.
2002
Contents
A Special Issue in Honor of Leonard H. Babby
Reflections
Wayles Browne and Catherine V. Chvany
In Honor of Leonard H. Babby 5
The Publications of Leonard H. Babby, 1969-present 17
Articles
John Frederick Bailyn
Overt Predicators 23
Loren A. Billings
Phrasal Clitics 53
Vladimir Borschev and Barbara H. Partee
The Russian Genetitive of Negation: Theme-Rheme Structure or Perspective Structure? 105
Steven Franks
A Jakobsonian Feature Based Analysis of the Slavic Numeric Quantifier Genitive 145
Stephanie Harves
Genitive of Negation and the Existential Paradox 185
Charles Jones and James S. Levine
Russian V+ šč- Adjectives and Adverbs 213
James E. Lavine and Robert Freidin
The Subject of Defective T(ense) in Slavic 251
Marjorie J. McShane
Unexpressed Objects in Russian 289
Gilbert C. Rappaport
Numeral Phrases in Russian: A Minimalist Approach 327
Archives
Leonard H. Babby
Subjectlessness, External Subcategorization, and the Projection Principle 341
Article Abstracts
John Frederick Bailyn
Overt Predicators
Abstract: This paper explores morphological evidence for the functional category Pred. The Russian lexical items kak and za are introduced as overt predicators with particular “case-absorption” properties. This analysis is extended to other possible predicators in Russian and Polish. The central claim is that overt predicators “neutralize” the inherent (instrumental) case property of Pred in Russian, resulting in “Sameness of Case” effects, familiar from Serbo-Croatian.
Loren A. Billings
Phrasal Clitics
Abstract: This study proposes an Optimality-theoretic model through which the various grammar components (semantics, syntax, the lexicon, morphology, and prosody) jointly determine the placement of clitics with a phrasal positioning domain, which is either a nominal expression or a clause. In order to render scope, such clitics must be phrase-initial. However, the morphology, carrying out subcategorization encoded in the lexicon, requires many such clitics to be suffixes. A third constraint prohibits affixation across certain syntactic boundaries. These three constraints require conflicting outputs, and cannot all be satisfied simultaneously. Depending on a particular language's constraint hierarchy, at least one constraint must be violated. Thus, a typology of clitic-placement strategies is predicted. This theory of cross-linguistic variation is based on conflicting requirements imposed by the aforementioned components of the grammar. In addition to an overview of clitic phenomena in Slavic and elsewhere, this paper demonstrates the proposed typology primarily using a clitic phenomenon in Russian in comparison to those in Tagalog and Warlpiri. In addition, these proposals make specific predictions about which kinds of clitic positioning can and cannot occur. Namely, these constraints predict an asymmetry in clitic-positioning types, excluding penultimate clisis.
Vladimir Borschev and Barbara H. Partee
The Russian Genetitive of Negation: Theme-Rheme Structure or Perspective Structure?
Abstract: In recent work we have come to challenge assumptions that we shared (Borschev and Partee 1998a) with Babby (1980) concerning the role of Theme-Rheme structure in accounting for the nominative-genitive alternation in negated existential sentences (the NES construction, in the terms of Babby (1980), the classic work which we are building on). The challenge is exemplified most clearly in our "kefir example":
(i) [Ja iskal kefir.] Kefira v magazine ne bylo.
[I looked-for kefir.] Kefirgen.m.sg in store NEG wasN.SG
[I was looking for kefir.] There wasn't any kefir in the store.
It is an important part of the explanatory structure of Babby 1980 that in sentence (i), the Theme is v magazine and the Rheme is kefir- [byl-]. Babby takes Theme-Rheme structure to be crucial for determining the scope of negation, and scope of negation to be a necessary condition in licensing the occurrence of the genitive of negation. But arguments from word order, intonation, and pragmatics have convinced us that kefira in example (i) must be considered (part of) the Theme, and not the Rheme. We now argue that independent of Theme-Rheme structure there is a relevant "perspective structure", a kind of diathesis choice, allowing a proposition involving a suitable verb to be structured with either of its two arguments as "Perspectival Center". In a locative DS, the sentence predicates "being in a certain location" of the "thing" argument, whereas in an ES, the sentence predicates "having a certain thing in it" of the "location" argument. The theoretical status of such a layer of structure remains in need of further investigation.
Steven Franks
A Jakobsonian Feature Based Analysis of the Slavic Numeric Quantifier Genitive
Abstract: This paper subjects the GB parametric account of variation in Slavic numeral systems put forward in Franks (1995) to critical scrutiny from the perspective of minimalism. It is argued that the true nature of the variation lies in the case contexts in which QPs (phrases in which GEN-Q is assigned) can occur in the different languages. It is further argued that this variation is best understood in markedness terms, applied to a specific set of morphosyntactically motivated case features, loosely based on the semantic ones proposed in Jakobson, 1936, 1958).
Stephanie Harves
Genitive of Negation and the Existential Paradox
Abstract: This paper presents a new approach to the interpretation and Case-marking of NPs in the genitive of negation construction in Russian. I argue that analyses that determine the scope of an NP based on positions within Case-checking chains fail to account for the lack of a Definiteness Effect on subjects of BE in negated existential and locative constructions. Instead, I adopt a modified version of Beghelli and Stowell 1997, arguing that scope is licensed in the syntax via a feature-matching mechanism. This analysis will successfully prohibit referentially independent NPs from valuing genitive Case in transitive and unaccusative sentences, while simultaneously allowing them to value genitive Case in locative and existential BE-sentences.
Charles Jones and James S. Levine
Russian V+ šč- Adjectives and Adverbs
Abstract: This article elaborates on a problem raised in Babby 1986: the relation of Russian ä‹ij-participles to homophonous ä‹ij-adjectives and to corresponding ä‹e-adverbs (e.g., the participle ugroìajuä‹ij '[who is] threatening' and the adjective ugroìajuä‹ij 'threatening' to the adverb ugroìajuä‹e 'threateningly'). While the formation of active ä‹ij-participles from imperfective verbs is completely productive, the recategorization of these participles to adjectives and adverbs is less so. We show that, within a restricted theory of argument structure and morphology (Williams 1994), the V+ä‹- —> A derivation is quite free, while its particular syntactic successes and failures follow from the predicational properties of the underlying verb's argument structure. We specify which lexical classes allow the V+ä‹- —> A derivation and show how these classes are determined by the aspectual nature of their members (Tenny 1994).
James E. Lavine and Robert Freidin
The Subject of Defective T(ense) in Slavic
Abstract: In this paper we argue that the EPP requirement of Tense (that it occur with a specifier) is an independent syntactic primitive that is operative in the absence of both nominative Case and subject-predicate agreement. This proposal is supported empirically by a class of accusative-Case-assigning unaccusatives in Russian and Ukrainian. For these predicate types, the direct internal argument bears accusative case, but occurs in Spec-TP at PF. This results only when T lacks agreement features, thereby establishing a correlation between a defective Tense, which is f-incomplete, and a f-complete light-v, which values accusative Case of a complement. We conclude that there is no such thing as "Case absorption". This displacement, which is not predicted by Burzio's Generalization, is driven by the EPP, rather than Case or agreement.
Marjorie J. McShane
Unexpressed Objects in Russian
Abstract: ThIs paper adduces evidence for "first internal argument" as an independent syntactic entity, regardless of case-marking, by virtue of similar behavior with respect to missing-object potential. Implications are explored for the machine translation into English of Russian sentences containing unexpressed objects, particularly for cases in which there is a mismatch for non-expression of the object in the two languages.
Gilbert C. Rappaport
Numeral Phrases in Russian: A Minimalist Approach
Abstract: The present paper seeks to update Leonard Babby's 1987 analysis of "heterogeneous" vs. "homogeneous" morphosyntax in numeral expressions, as well as to refine the analysis, making use of recent syntactic developments, namely the emergence of the case-assigning mechanism Agree. The key insight is that numerals differ with respect to whether they contain a valued case feature. Heterogeneous case marking follows from a valued case feature on the nominal, while the homogeneous pattern reflects an unvalued case feature on the numeral, allowing for the numerically-quantified nominal expression to receive a single case from a higher lexical-case-assigning head.
2001
Contents
Articles
Frank Y. Gladney
Verbs in Russian are Inflected for ±Real, ±Perfective, and ±Iterative 187
Alla Nedashkivska
Whither or Where: Case Choice and Verbs of Placement in Contemporary Ukrainian 213
Arthur Stepanov
Intensional Root Infinitives in Early Child Russian 253
Reviews
Robert D. Borsley
Anna Bondaruk. Comparison in English and Polish Adjectives: A Syntactic Study 287
Željko Bošković
Mila Dimitrova-Vulchanova, ed. Topics in South Slavic Syntax and Semantics 297
Ljiljana Progovac
Steven Franks and Tracy Halloway King A Handbook of Slavic Clitics 317
Catherine Rudin
Kjeti Rå Hauge. A Short Grammar of Contemporary Bulgarian 325
Gunter Schaarschmidt
Heinz Schuster-Šewc. Das Sorbische im slawischen Kontext 331
Article Abstracts
Frank Y. Gladney
Verbs in Russian are Inflected for ±Real, ±Perfective, and ±Iterative
Abstract: Verbs in Russian are inflected for [±REAL] and [±PERF] (perfective), base-generated features of the I(nflection) node, and for [±ITER(ative)], a base-generated feature of the V nodes. I may be lexicalized with one of the verbs for ‘be’, which are [–REAL] by, [+REAL], [+PERF] budet, and [–PERF] 0, in which case the verb receives nonfinite form. Or I may remain empty, in which case the verb raises to it and receives finite form. V consists of P(refix), which is sometimes null, and a lower V. Either V node may be specified [±ITER]. In the unmarked case, the upper V is [–ITER], but it switches to [+ITER] to implement a [–PERF] specification on I when P is lexicalized. The upper V can be [+ITER] independently of the [±PERF] feature of I, and this accounts for much of Aktionsart.
Alla Nedashkivska
Whither or Where: Case Choice and Verbs of Placement in Contemporary Ukrainian
Abstract: This article examines spatial relations in contemporary Ukrainian as connectedness in space between an object (Located Entity) and a spatial orienting point (Spatial Frame). The spatial relations discussed here are those conveyed by the prepositions v ‘in’ and na ‘on’ when used with four verbs of positioning: visaty/povisyty ‘hang’, stavyty/postavyty ‘stand’, klasty/poklasty ‘lay’, and sadyty/posadyty ‘seat’. The study focuses on whether, and to what extent, the directional placement expressed with these verbs can be coded with the locative case instead of the prescribed accusative. The data demonstrate that the use of the locative case for the directional placement is common in Ukrainian; however, this use is acceptable only under certain conditions. It is shown that the most important factor that influences the acceptability of the locative is the degree of verb and utterance Transitivity, which depends on grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic factors. Specifically, high-transitivity and low-transitivity contexts are associated with accusative and locative cases, respectively. In addition, the analysis underscores the importance of a pragmatic approach to the study of Ukrainian case.
Arthur Stepanov
Intensional Root Infinitives in Early Child Russian
Abstract: Previous research on children’s use of non-finite verb forms in finite contexts—Root Infinitives (RIs)—distinguished two types of the latter: those that describe an on-going activity (“extensional”), and those that are produced in the context of children’s wishes, desires, or intentions (“intensional”). This study provides a syntactic account of children’s intensional RIs. I argue that the aspects of the children’s grammar involved in generating intensional RIs (e.g. Tense/Agr system) are completely adult-like. On the basis of a quasi-experimental study of the spontaneous speech corpus of the Russian child, Varvara (CHILDES, Protassova 1988, MacWhinney and Snow 1990), I show that the syntactic structure of an intensional RI is that of a complement of an intensional predicate like want in adult Russian. The intensional predicate itself undergoes PF deletion under identity with its linguistic antecedent, in accord with the theory of surface anaphora of Hankamer and Sag (1976). The linguistic antecedent may be recovered in two ways: 1) from the previous discourse recorded in the transcript; 2) from the child’s ”internal monologue” which is assumed to be part of the linguistic discourse by virtue of the child’s Theory of Mind, a naive psychological framework underlying the young children’s system of knowledge and beliefs. Although RIs accounted for in the second way are not adult-like, their non-adult status is not due to any property of children’s grammar, but is a result of a particular stage in psychological development.
Contents
Articles
David Danaher
Czech Habitual Verbs and Conceptual Distancing 3
Stephen M. Dickey
"Semelfactive" -no- and the Western Aspect Gestalt 25
Alina Israeli
The Choice of Aspect in Russian Verbs of Communication 49
Hans Robert Mehlig
Verbal Aspect and the Referential Status of Verbal Predicates 99
Gary H. Toops
Aspectual Competition and Iterative Contexts in Contemporary Upper Sorbian 127
Remarks
Ljiljana Saric
Temporal Adverbial Quantifiers and Aspect Choice in Croatian 155
Charles E. Townsend
An Approach to Describing and Teaching Slavic Verbal Aspect: Aspect and the Lexicon 171
Article Abstracts
David Danaher
Czech Habitual Verbs and Conceptual Distancing
Abstract: One of the more puzzling meanings associated with Czech habitual or iterative verbs is their tendency in past morphology to denote a distant past. Traditional, feature-based analyses of this verb form’s semantics cannot adequately account for the status of the distant past meaning. Other scholars see a link between the distant past tendency and the feature of indeterminate iterativity that is part of the verb’s core semantics—thereby making the verb’s behavior in past morphology coherent with its behavior in present morphology—although the exact nature of this link has yet to be adequately described. Using a corpus of examples taken from sources in contemporary literary Czech, I argue that the distant-past meaning is in fact only a tendency. Verbs of this type can be used to express a remote past, a past period of time which is ambiguous with regard to remoteness, and, in some instances, a more or less recent past. The key to making sense of this behavior is an understanding of remoteness as primarily conceptual and not merely temporal; temporal distance becomes one possible, even preferred, realization of the broader phenomenon of conceptual distance. The notion of conceptual distancing also provides an adequate explanation for the link between morphologically past and present usages of the verb since morphologically present usages, as inductive generalizations over a class of entities or events, naturally presuppose distancing. My analysis is grounded in Charles Peirce’s semiotic treatment of habit and Ronald Langacker’s cognitive grammar framework.
Stephen M. Dickey
"Semelfactive" -no- and the Western Aspect Gestalt
Abstract: This article presents a discussion of differences between the Slavic languages regarding the historical productivity of -no,- as an aspectual suffix. It is shown that a class of prefixed pf a-stem/n-stem doublets has been more productive in a group of western languages (primarily Czech, Slovak, Upper Sorbian) and that this productivity declines in the languages farther to the east, reaching a minimum in Russian and Bulgarian. Further, differences are shown regarding the function of -no,- as a perfectivizing suffix in some Common Slavic unprefixed pf verbs. These differences are then discussed, with no claims to an exhaustive analysis.
Alina Israeli
The Choice of Aspect in Russian Verbs of Communication
Abstract: This article establishes the parameters governing choice of aspect in verbs of communication. The aspectual opposition under consideration is the imperfective general-factual vs. the perfective. Two types of pragmatic contract govern the communication: external contract, related to the expectancy of the communicative act, and the internal contract, which is part of the lexically-imposed expectation of the addressee’s communication and/or post-communication response. The non-fulfillment of either type of contract triggers imperfective general-factual. In addition, features of intentionality, consequentiality, and authority affect the choice of aspect. A section on performatives provides a taxonomy of aspectual uses and demonstrates that authority and reiteration are the key features.
Hans Robert Mehlig
Verbal Aspect and the Referential Status of Verbal Predicates
Abstract: Verbal predicates denoting situations which are located not simultaneously but retrospectively in time with respect to an absolute or relative “present” allow two fundamentally different intepretations: an actual one and a non-actual one. Each of the two possible interpretations is based on a different conceptual level. In the actual interpretation, a predicate refers to one or more concrete situations occupying a well-defined place in time and space; in the non-actual interpretation the predicate refers to the “type” of situation and thus to situations that are potentially locatable in time, but not related concretely on the time axis. This distinction between actuality and non-actuality—between reference to one or more “tokens” of a situation and reference to the type of the situation—is of primary importance for the category of aspect in Russian. Verbal predicates referring to actual situations can be presented from different perspectives by means of different aspectual forms—they allow a situation to be presented from an internal or an external perspective. In contrast, predicates interpreted non-actually involve a neutralization of the aspect opposition. In the latter case, only the imperfective aspect is acceptable and has no aspectual function, but functions merely as the aspectual genus proximum. This article shows that the distinction between actual and non-actual reference—between token- and type-reference—is also relevant for aspect usage in Who-questions.
Gary H. Toops
Aspectual Competition and Iterative Contexts in Contemporary Upper Sorbian
Abstract: In Upper Sorbian, as in the other contemporary West Slavic languages, itera-tive/habitual actions (acts or events) can be expressed by both imperfective and perfec-tive verbs. Aspectual competition in iterative contexts is therefore complete. Based on the results of a questionnaire that incorporated a variety of iterative contexts and that was administered to native speakers of Upper Sorbian in July-August 2000, the article demon-strates that a number of lexical, stylistic, and morphosemantic factors condition aspect selection by today’s native speakers of Upper Sorbian. This is shown to hold true across generational lines, whether today’s speakers of Upper Sorbian instantiate verbal aspect as a strict imperfective-perfective opposition; or whether—in the case of prefixed verbs and their stem-suffixed (formerly imperfective) counterparts—they instantiate a quasi-aspec-tual indeterminate-determinate opposition. The article thus counters claims made by some Slavists that verbal aspect in contemporary Upper Sorbian is obsolete, functionally restricted, or subordinate to other grammatical categories such as tense.
Ljiljana Saric
Temporal Adverbial Quantifiers and Aspect Choice in Croatian
Abstract: This analysis of the interaction of temporal quantifiers and aspect in Croatian and Serbian is based on examples containing the frequency adverbs rijetko, ponekad, cesto, uvijek and the repetitive adverbs dva puta/dvaput, tri puta/triput, nekoliko puta, vise puta, puno/mnogo puta and nebrojeno puta. Occurrences of these adverbial expressions in discourse are examined to see if and to what extent there is a correlation between repeated action and the notion of imperfectivity, and if the semantic differences between the analyzed adverbs make any difference in this regard. Some differences in the preference for the perfective in contexts of repetition in Croatian and Serbian are also discussed.
Charles E. Townsend
An Approach to Describing and Teaching Slavic Verbal Aspect: Aspect and the Lexicon
Abstract not available
2000
Contents
Special Issue on Polish
Articles
Barbara Citko
On the Syntax and Semantics of Polish Adjunct Clauses 5
Ewa Dornisch
Pronominal Object Clitics as the Head of Transitivity Phrase 29
Katarzyna Dziwirek
Why Polish Doesn’t Like Infinitives 57
Marjorie J. McShane
Hierarchies of Parallelism in Elliptical Polish Structures 83
Adam Przepiórkowski
Long Distance Genitive of Negation in Polish 119
Gilbert C. Rappaport
Extraction from Nominal Phrases in Polish and the Theory of Determiners 159
María-Luisa Rivero
Impersonal się in Polish: A Simplex Expression Anaphor 199
Bożena Rozwadowska
Hierarchies of Parallelism in Elliptical Polish Structures 239
Marek Świdziński
Negativity Transmission in Polish Constructions with Participles and Gerunds 263
Jacek Witkoś
Nominative-to-Genitive Shift and the Negative Copula nie ma: Implications for Checking Theory and for the Nature of the EPP in Polish 295
Article Abstracts
Barbara Citko
On the Syntax and Semantics of Polish Adjunct Clauses
Abstract: This paper examines the structure and interpretation of Polish clausal adjuncts involving what looks like a wh-pronoun jak ‘how’. The presence of the same wh-word in three distinct constructions raises two interesting questions: (i) What, if any, is the semantic contribution of the word jak?, and (ii) Where exactly does the manner, temporal and conditional interpretation come from? The paper shows that jak, in addition to being a manner wh-pronoun, can function as a complementizer, which correlates with the loss of manner interpretation.
Ewa Dornisch
Pronominal Object Clitics as the Head of Transitivity Phrase
Abstract: Recent proposals that subjects are introduced in the specifier position of a projection above VP but below TP, referred to as Transitivity Phrase, naturally raise the question of whether the head of this projection can be lexically instantiated. This paper argues that pronominal object clitics are in fact overt realizations of that head (Tr). Further, I argue that the V-feature of Tr is not universally strong as has been proposed in Collins 1997 and (indirectly) in Chomsky 1995. I will demonstrate that in Polish the V-feature of Tr can be either strong or weak. When the V-feature of Tr is weak, the raising of V to Tr is not triggered. This proposal accounts, among other things, for the possibility of pronominal clitics in Polish moving independently from the verb or any other constituent.
Katarzyna Dziwirek
Why Polish Doesn’t Like Infinitives
Abstract: This paper proposes an explanation for three gaps in the array of Polish infinitival constructions: the lack of object control with accusative controllers, ECM verbs, and object raising. The hypothesis rests on two basic notions: a) the standard RG analyses of these constructions which involve cross-clausal 1–2 multiattachments, and b) the proposal that 1–2 multiattachments in Polish are ALWAYS resolved by a birth of the reflexive clitic sie. Put together, a) and b) result in a clash between universally well formed RNs and a Polish-specific morpho-syntactic requirement. Since the multiattached nominal is the subject of one clause and a direct object of another, the grammar does not know which verb to assign the clitic to and thus disallows these constructions. In English, where 1–2 multiattachments are not overtly marked, such conflict does not arise and the constructions are valid. It is argued that data concerning -sja in Russian provide support for the analysis. The changing status of -sja manifests itself in two syntactic ways. One, previously noted, is the existence of several -sja marked verbs which occur with accusative complements. Another, is the existence of a few verbs which allow the “accusative plus infinitive” construction. Both indicate a new stage in the changing role of -sja and the way Russian treats 1–2 multiattachments. Neither is allowed in Polish, where the bi-unique connection between sie and 1–2 multiattachment is very strong.
Marjorie J. McShane
Hierarchies of Parallelism in Elliptical Polish Structures
Abstract: This paper discusses the ellipsis of accusative direct objects (DOs), the enclitic sie, and the conditional marker by in Polish. While these three elements are grammatically heterogeneous, they show identical patterns of ellipsis in configurations marked by a high degree of parallelism. This suggests that certain fundamental properties of ellipsis hold language-wide, and that generalizations are missed when ellipsis is approached in the traditional category-by-category fashion.
Adam Przepiórkowski
Long Distance Genitive of Negation in Polish
Abstract: The aim of this article is to provide a formal analysis of non-local Genitive of Negation in Polish, a phenomenon occurring in so-called ‘clause union’ environments and consisting in the genitive case being assigned to an object of a lower verb when a higher verb is negated, instead of the expected accusative. In particular, I examine two aspects of such non-local Genitive of Negation, occasionally noted in the traditional literature, but ignored in formal or generative linguistics, namely, its optionality and its potential multiplicity. I show that the main characteristics of non-local Genitive of Negation follow in a straightforward manner from the interaction of two independently motivated analyses, namely, an analysis of ‘clause union’ environments as involving optional raising, and a local nonconfigurational analysis of syntactic case assignment. Both analyses are couched within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. I argue that the resulting account is superior to previous analyses of non-local Genitive of Negation in Polish on empirical, formal and conceptual grounds.
Gilbert C. Rappaport
Extraction from Nominal Phrases in Polish and the Theory of Determiners
Abstract: A Parameterized Determiner Phrase Hypothesis has been developed in recent work: Noun Phrases are embedded as the complement of a functional category Determiner in a language if and only if that language has overt articles. It would follow that extraction from within a Noun Phrase will be more restricted in a Determiner language, because of the additional structure. While this hypothesis is plausible, we argue against it on empirical grounds, focusing in detail on the data of English and Polish (by hypothesis, Determiner and Determiner-less languages, respectively). While there are differences in extraction between the two languages, the similarities are far greater than the Parameterized Determiner Phrase Hypothesis predicts. In fact, the similarities provide arguments for Determiners in Polish. The paper develops an account of observed extraction patterns in terms of recent work in Minimalism, relying in particular on the Phase Impenetrability Condition and cyclic spell-out of phases (rendering portions of structure opaque to further syntactic operations). English and Polish differ in whether the functional category D can have an ‘EPP’ feature, invoking raising to Spec-of-D. This parameter of variation is unrelated to whether or not a language has overt articles.
María-Luisa Rivero
Impersonal się in Polish: A Simplex Expression Anaphor
Abstract: Polish resembles Italian, Slovenian, and Spanish, and differs from Bulgarian, Czech, Romanian, and standard Serbo-Croatian in displaying an arbitrary subject use for reflexive się. Polish shares with other Slavic languages an arbitrary object use for this clitic. Arbitrary się is an indefinite pronoun of the S(implex) E(xpression) anaphor type, as in Reinhart and Reuland (1993). It signals the movement chain of a phonologically null defective NP with a human feature but no ?-features that raises as external or internal argument of the predicate to the “base-generated” się to repair its formal and referential deficiencies, by checking Case and receiving quantificational force. One use of się as SE-anaphor distinguishes Polish both from other Slavic languages and from the Romance languages: as expletive, it can transmit the thematic, binding, and control properties of the external argument to a non-selected Dative.
Bożena Rozwadowska
Hierarchies of Parallelism in Elliptical Polish Structures
Abstract: The paper discusses aspectual distinctions among Polish nominalizations belonging to different semantic domains, in particular action nominals and psych nominals. It is demonstrated that in Polish there are two types of nominals that qualify as complex event nominals in the understanding of Grimshaw 1990: aspectually ambiguous derived nominals whose properties are like those of English derived nominals and verbal nouns which have grammatical aspect and form aspectual pairs like the related verbs. It is argued that not only action nominalizations but also psych nominalizations denote complex eventualities, except that in the former the culmination point terminates the eventuality whereas in the latter it is at the beginning. The perfective/imperfective contrast is taken as evidence for the complexity of the eventuality and the heterogenous nature of the component subevents. In conclusion, it is suggested that the atomic Vendlerian taxonomy of event types is insufficient for the analysis of different types of complex events and furthermore that the overt aspectual distinctions among Polish nominalizations belonging to different semantic domains might be also present covertly in other languages, which leads to ambiguities of various sorts.
Marek Świdziński
Negativity Transmission in Polish Constructions with Participles and Gerunds
Abstract: The paper deals with the problem of negativity transmission in sentences which contain a phrase headed by the word form of a participle: adjectival (czytajacy, czytany) or adverbial (czytajac, przeczytawszy), a gerund (czytanie), or quasi-gerund (nieczytanie). A formal account of the issue within the Metamorphosis Grammar framework is proposed. In Polish negative sentences two syntactic phenomena are observed: (a) Genitive of Negation (accusative complements convert into genitive), and (b) Negative Concord (negative pronouns, like nikt, nic, nigdzie, cannot appear in non-negative sentences). The impact of negation is bi-directional (top-down and bottom-up). Participial and gerundial phrases syntactically behave in two ways. Negation of the higher verb(al) phrase either affeand for theey were constituents of the whole phrase (negativity tunnel), or it does not (negativity island). The formal description of Polish negation given in Âwidziƒski (1992) is presented. In the rules of the grammar syntactic units are parametrized terms. The mechanism of parameter scattering and matching is used to account for various agreement phenomena. A number of adjustments to the grammar are proposed to cover constructions with a participial or gerundial constituent.
Jacek Witkoś
Nominative-to-Genitive Shift and the Negative Copula nie ma: Implications for Checking Theory and for the Nature of the EPP in Polish
Abstract: This paper deals with the issue of the Genitive of Negation (GN) showing up on apparent subjects in certain constructions with the negative locative copula in Polish and its consequences for the theory of feature checking. The GN on the apparent subject is taken to result from the same case feature checking mechanism as the regular GN on the nominal objects of negated transitive verbs; in both cases the relevant nominals are attracted to v, forming [spec, vP] to have their [+Objective] feature checked. They are then further attracted by the head of NegP in covert syntax. The attraction of the nominals and the feature checking on the two functional heads is morphologically manifested in the form of the Genitive. A derivation including such procedure of GN licensing on the sole nominal argument of the negative locative copula requires services of a case feature carrying expletive pro, whose task is to check the relevant features of T. A closer analysis of a group of unaccusative verbs licensing (partitive) Genitive on their arguments (arguably also in the [spec, vP] position) reveals that derivations using this type of expletive pro are necessary for independent reasons. As expected, the arguments of both the unaccusative verbs licensing (partitive) Genitive and the negative locative copula fail to show properties typical of syntactic subjects. The paper ends with a discussion of the role of expletive elements in the derivation.
1999
Contents
Reflections
Daniela S. Hristova
Total Fears 171
Articles
Alina Israeli
'Same' and 'Different' in Russian 179
John Moore and David M. Perlmutter
Case, Agreement, and Temporal Particles in Russian Infinitival Clauses 219
Yuri Novikov and Tom Priestly
Gender Differentiation in Personal and Professional Titles in Contemporary Russian 247
Irina A. Sekerina
The Scrambling Complexity Hypothesis and Processing of Split Scrambling Constructions in Russian 265
Sandra Stjepanovic
Scrambling: Overt Movement or Base Generation and LF Movement? 305
Reviews
Robert A. Orr
H. Schuster-Šewc. Grammar of the Upper Sorbian Language: Phonology and Morphology 325
Gilbert C. Rappaport
Robert D. Borsley and Adam Przepiórkowski, eds. Slavic in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar 331
Article Abstracts
Alina Israeli
'Same' and 'Different' in Russian
Abstract: The article analyses the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors governing the use of expressions meaning 'the same' and 'different' in Russian. It demonstrates that one of the factors is the number of items: one item (similarity) or two items (sameness). It also demonstrates that the six basic and two deictic ways to say 'the same' and the three ways to say 'different' represent either a sentence-external reading or a sentence-internal reading. This criterion partially overlaps with the treatment of the entities compared as co-equals, since only a sentence-internal reading may allow such treatment in the cases of similarity, sameness and difference. Other factors in the case of sameness may include the unexpectedness of the second mention of the item, reminding of the previous use or the perceived inappropriateness of the second use, and whether or not the entity is shared.
John Moore and David M. Perlmutter
Case, Agreement, and Temporal Particles in Russian Infinitival Clauses
Abstract: In this paper we argue that the Russian particles bylo, byvalo, and budet, when they occur in infinitival clauses with dative subjects, are not auxiliaries but adverbial temporal particles. This analysis accounts for the fact that they are morphologically invariant, that is, do not agree with their dative subject. We provide five arguments for this analysis, based on the placement of negation, aspectual restrictions, bylo and byvalo in finite clauses, their occurrence with other auxiliaries, and their use as modifiers of adjectives. Our analysis has implications for the general analysis of infinitival clauses in Russian. We argue, contra recent claims, that Russian infinitivals are not tensed. Our account also has consequences for the treatment of second-dative phenomena.
Yuri Novikov and Tom Priestly
Gender Differentiation in Personal and Professional Titles in Contemporary Russian
Abstract: A short sociolinguistic study was conducted among Russian immigrants and visitors to Canada to determine the influence of various factors, such as age, sex, education, social status, and the location of longest residence in the former Soviet Union, on the choice of gender in feminine personal and professional titles, in specifiers of unchangeable masculine nouns, and in past-tense verbal forms. The influence of age and longest place of residence in the former Soviet Union were shown to be significant for nouns, while the education factor was more likely to affect the use of feminine adjectival and preterit verbal forms in the specification of unchangeable masculine nouns.
Irina A. Sekerina
The Scrambling Complexity Hypothesis and Processing of Split Scrambling Constructions in Russian
Abstract: This article investigates the processing of discontinuous constituents in Russian which result from Split Scrambling. Two experiments are reported, an on-line chunk-by-chunk self-paced reading study and a norming sentence completion questionnaire. The experimental findings provide evidence for the processing complexity of Split Scrambling compared to phrasal XP-Scrambling, as reflected in increased reading times in Experiment 1 and avoidance of discontinuous constituents through morphological means, such as novel nominalizations, in Experiment 2. These results support the Scrambling Complexity Hypothesis (SCH).
Sandra Stjepanovic
Scrambling: Overt Movement or Base Generation and LF Movement?
Abstract: In this paper I have tried to tease apart two approaches dealing with the last-resort problem of scrambling within the Minimalist framework, in particular, that of Fukui (1993) and Saito and Fukui (1992; 1998) on one side and Boskovic and Takahashi's (1998) on the other. I have shown that the latest version of Saito and Fukui's account, Saito and Fukui (1998), is empirically problematic. Boskovic and Takahashi's (1998) theory, which involves the base generation of scrambled elements in their surface positions and their LF movement to positions where they receive theta-roles, does not run into these problems.
Contents
Reflections
Jan Louis Perkowski
A Note on Serendipity 3
Articles
Stephen M. Dickey
Expressing Ingressivity in Slavic: The Contextually-Conditioned Imperfective Past vs. the Phase Verb stat' and Procedural za- 11
Marjorie J. McShane
The Ellipsis of Accusative Direct Objects in Russian, Polish and Czech 45
Kjetil Rå Hauge
The Word Order of Predicate Clitics in Bulgarian 89
Reviews
Liliane Haegeman
Sue Brown. The Syntax of Negation in Russian. A Minimalist Approach 139
Charles E. Townsend
Milena Sipková. Stavba vety v mluvenych projevech: Syntax hanáckych nárecí 167
Article Abstracts
Stephen M. Dickey
Expressing Ingressivity in Slavic: The Contextually-Conditioned Imperfective Past vs. the Phase Verb stat' and Procedural za-
Abstract: This article discusses different modes of expressing ingressivity in the Slavic languages – the grammatical expression of ingressivity (by means of imperfective verb forms) and its lexical expression (by means of the use of stat' as an ingressive phase verb or perfective procedural verbs prefixed with za-) – and relates them to one another as two competing systems. It is shown that these phenomena are in complementary distribution: languages that imploy the contextually-conditioned imperfective past to a high degree only imploy stat' and za to express ingressivity to a very low degree or not at all, and vice-versa. More specifically, the contextually-conditioned imperfective past is characteristic of the extreme western end of Slavic (Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, Slovene), whereas stat' and za are characteristic of an eastern group of languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorusion, Bulgarian); two languages (Polish and Serbo-Croatian occupy a transitional position between the two groups. Finally, the respective modes of expressing ingressivity are discussed within the theory of Slavic aspect developed in Dickey 1997.
Marjorie J. McShane
The Ellipsis of Accusative Direct Objects in Russian, Polish and Czech
Abstract: This article explores the ellipsis of configurational Accusative direct objects whose antecedents are Accusative or Nominative noun phrases. Ellipsis potential is shown to vary significantly among the three Slavic languages under study, according to the continuum Russian > Polish > Czech. Within each language, however, patterns of ellipsis are largely predictable based on the interaction of syntactic, lexico-semantic, and discourse factors.
Kjetil Rå Hauge
The Word Order of Predicate Clitics in Bulgarian
Abstract: First published in 1976 as no. 10 in the series Universitet i Oslo. Meddelelser. Slavisk-baltisk institutt. The clitics are introduced and listed in section 1. Section 2 deals with the question of movable clitics, and section 3 with the relative ordering of clitic pronouns and their cooccurence constraints. The present tense of the auxiary verb/copula sâm, the future particle ste, the negative particle ne, the question particle li, and the particle da are discussed in sections 4 - 8. Section 9 takes up questions in connection with stressed auxiliary verb forms, and conclusions are given in section 10.
1998
Contents
Reflections
Charles E. Townsend.
Slavic Linguistics: From Jers to Dostoevsky to Jers and Theta-Roles 161
Articles
George Cummins
Indefiniteness in Czech 171
Maaike Schoorlemmer
Complex Event Nominals in Russian: Properties and Readings 205
Ludmila Veselovska
Possessive Movement in the Czech Nominal Phrase 255
Reviews
Sue Brown and Catherine Chvany
A.A. Kibrik, I.M. Kobozeva, I.A. Sekerina. Fundamental'ny napravlenija sovremennoj amerikanskoj lingvistiki. Sbornik obzorov. [Basic trends in contemporary American linguistics: A collection of essays] 301
Article Abstracts
George Cummins
Indefiniteness in Czech
Abstract: In Czech there are no articles; determination (definiteness and indefiniteness), a linguistic universal, is known to be submerged in the wider domains of discourse context, sentence intonation, word order, and lexical quantification. The following study examines the interaction of these domains in the expression of indefiniteness, with spe cial attention to word order, speaker-knowledge entailments, and the four quantifiers nejaky, jakysi, jeden, and jakykoliv. It is shown that in some environments nejaky 'a; some' approaches the status of an indefinite article. In certain word-order contexts this quantifier is obligatory with animate subjects.
Maaike Schoorlemmer
Complex Event Nominals in Russian: Properties and Readings
Abstract: Derived nominals in Russian and many other languages come in types with different interpretations, different relations to the underlying verb and different argument realizations. This paper argues for an approach to these distinctions along the following lines:
In order to make sense of the nominalization data the first task is to distinguish between result nominals, Simple Event Nominals and Complex Event Nominals (CENs, Grimshaw 1990). This includes a discussion of the argument structure of the underlying verbs, of the derived nominals and their various argument realizations;
The second task is to clarify the origin of different readings of CENs, like 'manner of action', 'fact', 'event'. I contest the idea that argument realization is crucial in determining the various readings (Paduceva 1980, 1984). Instead, my claim (following Vendler 1967) is that context is the only factor relevant to the interpretation;
It is the status of the nominal as a CEN or result nominal that will in turn determine how the various arguments may be realized.
The context determination of the available reading extends to al possible noun phrases in a particular context. It turns out that in any context (i.e. reading) a CEN may occur in any argument realization.
Ludmila Veselovska
Possessive Movement in the Czech Nominal Phrase
Abstract: In this paper I demonstrate the semantic, morphological, and syntactic restrictions on possessive formation in Czech. Referring to the distinctions between possessive (poss) and genitive (gen) I argue that poss are nps while gens are dps in Czech and their complementary distribution is evidence for a syntactic movement which I call Possessive Movement. I propose that the potential of n to take an argument is encoded as a weak subcategorization feature +a of n. Referring to the Unlike Feature Condition I propose that if a cannot be satisfied at LF within the smallest np domain, it is transferred as strong to the N's functional projection d. The checking of the feature a of n takes place
a) at LF at the n level by an n-complement of form dp,
b) in syntax at the d level by spec-head relation between the d and np in spec(dp).
Contents
Articles
Ljiljana Progovac
Event pronominal to 3
Richard Schupbach
Intra-Linguistic Borrowing in Russian 41
Roumyana Slabakova
L2Acquisition of an Aspect Parameter 71
Andrew Spencer and Marina Zaretskaya
Pri-Prifixation in Russian 107
Reviews
Ronald Feldstein
Christina Y. Bethin. Slavic prosody: Language change and phonological theory 137
Gunter Schaarschmidt
Kevin Hannan. Borders of language and identity in Teschen Silisia 145
Jens Nørgård-Sørensen
Björn Hansen. Zur Grammatik von Referenz und Epizodizität 149
Article Abstracts
Ljiljana Progovac
Event pronominal to
Abstract: The primary goal of this paper is to provide an analysis of the demonstrative to in Serbo-Croatian when used to refer to events. To is argued to be an event pronominal with three basic functions, also exhibited by regular pronouns: deictic, anaphoric and bound-variable function. In its deictic use, to is argued to head a distinct functional projection, which projection is associated with quantification over events. In its anaphoric use, to refers to a previously mentioned event. In its bound-variable use, to is proposed to be the spell-out of the bound event pronominal, which constitutes a syntactic reflex of the semantic analysis of adverbials as predicates of events (see Davidson 1967). It is a virtue of this analysis that it can unify the three uses of the event pronominal to, explaining both the similarities and the differences. To the extent to which this is the only way to unify the three uses of to, the paper provides indirect support not only for the underlying quantification over events/states, but also for the syntacticization of certain aspects of this quantification.
Richard Schupbach
Intra-Linguistic Borrowing in Russian
Abstract: When languages come into contact, they influence, not only each other's vocabularies through borrowing, but they may also influence each other's grammatical structures. In cases of "high contact" one normally observes morphological simplification, i.e., "koineization" (Trudgill's term). Conversely, one expects "complication", to accompany "low contact" or peripheralization of a dialect (Andersen 1988). The present work concerns a case of "high contact" and resulting borrowing, not between different languages, but between different styles of a single language (see Bartsch 1987: 196f). As Trudgill predicted, "high-contact situations come in many different forms, and we will not expect to find simplification in those (very many) contact situations where childhood bilingualism and second-variety acquisition are the norm. In these situations, on the contrary, we are liable, although not certain, to find intensive borrowing and interpenetration of linguistic systems, with possible resulting complication. (Trudgill 1989: 232)" [Italics are mine, RS] This, along with reinterpretation of function, is what we observe as a result of inter-stylistic borrowing of derivational models in Russian. In this case the resulting "complication" is not only quantitative (Style Y takes on a new affix from Style X ); but it is qualitative as well.
Roumyana Slabakova
L2Acquisition of an Aspect Parameter
Abstract: The article studies a contrast in the aspectual marking of telicity in English and Slavic languages (most examples are from Bulgarian). A solution based on a syntactic decomposition of eventive verbs into a causal subevent and a resultative state subevent is proposed. A template approach to aspectual composition is outlined. The differences in English and Slavic aspectual usage are argued to be due to the null versus overt character of the telic morpheme and its phrase structure position. An experimental study, based on this parametric difference, and investigating the competence of Slavic native speakers acquiring English is presented. Results are interpreted in the light of current theories of second language learners' access to Universal grammar.
Andrew Spencer and Marina Zaretskaya
Pri-Prifixation in Russian
Abstract: We examine one of the traditional Russian Aktionsarten ('sposoby dejstvija'), the attenuative PRI- verb (e.g. priotkryt´ 'to open a little'). This is universally claimed to be a type of quantitative Aktionsart. However, we advance morphological, syntactic and semantic arguments against this assumption. PRI- verbs readily give secondary imperfectives, which is uncommon with true Aktionsarten. They also permit 'unselected objects' as in prisypat´ jamu 'to partly fill in a pit' (cf. *sypat´ jamu). This is never found with genuine Aktionsarten but is characteristic of a type of lexical derivation based on lexical subordination at the level of semantic representation. Finally, a careful investigation of the meaning of PRI- verbs show that they do not express quantification over their objects but instead quantify over a resultant state. This fits in well with an analysis as lexical derivation but is incompatible with current thinking on the semantics of quantitative Aktionsart.
1997
Contents
Articles
Maria Babyonyshev
The Possessive Construction in Russian: A Crosslinguistic Perspective 193
Frank Y. Gladney
On the Syllabification of High Vowels in Late Common Slavic 235
Daniel Humphries
"Concrete Accomplishment" in Macedonian Imperfectives 251
Virginia Motapanyane
Preverbal Focus in Bulgarian 265
Olga Miseska Tomic
Non-First as a Default Clitic Position 301
Reviews
Steven Franks
Uwe Junghanns and Gerhild Zybatow, eds. Formale Slavistik 325
Ladislav Zgusta
Katja Sturm-Schnabl,ed. Der Briefwechsel Franz Miklosich's mit den Südslaven - Korespondenca Frana Miklosica z Juznimi Slovani 359
Article Abstracts
Maria Babyonyshev
The Possessive Construction in Russian: A Crosslinguistic Perspective
Abstract: The paper examines the syntactic and semantic properties of the Russian prenominal possessive construction. Evidence is offered for an analysis in which the possessive is inserted into the derivation as a nominal (not an adjective), and the "possessive form" is created when the N° undergoes head-movement in overt syntax and (eventually) adjoins to the possessive D°. It is shown that within such an analysis a number of semantic and lexical peculiarities of the construction are explained and, moreover, that they closely resemble the properties of N-to-D raising recently discussed for Romance languages in Longobardi 1994, 1996.
Frank Y. Gladney
On the Syllabification of High Vowels in Late Common Slavic
Abstract: Surface and intermediate [j] and [w] in Late Common Slavic are phonetic realizations of /i/ and /u/ as determined by the rules of syllabification, although in some cases syllabification is governed by the lexical specifications of individual morphemes rather than by their phonetic properties.
Daniel Humphries
"Concrete Accomplishment" in Macedonian Imperfectives
Abstract: In most Slavic literary languages prefixed perfective verbs have one corresponding derived imperfective built with one of the two historical imperfectivizing suffixes: -a+ and -ova+. Macedonian, however, derives two imperfectives for many prefixed perfective verbs and in many cases there is a substantial difference in meaning between these competing forms. This paper argues that a new grammatical category, concrete accomplishment, is responsible for such differences. In conclusion, historical causes are suggested for the development of this phenomenon, as well as predictions concerning its future.
Virginia Motapanyane
Preverbal Focus in Bulgarian
Abstract: Bulgarian preverbal focus involves overt movement to scope positions within TP or CP. In the framework of checking theory, this paper argues that the two strategies of focus movement follow from [focus] merging in T (when [focus] is abstract) or in C (when [focus] is morphological). Ensuing double feature checking on T or C leads to TP/CP configurations with multiple specifier structures. The distribution of [focus] on functional heads in structures with multiple specifiers accounts for crosslinguistic variation (e.g., exclusion of clefts, ban on wh-in-situ, multiple wh-movement). These facts support the hypothesis that [focus] acquires formal status and becomes visible for computation only in conjunction with the formal features [tense] and [wh].
Olga Miseska Tomic
Non-First as a Default Clitic Position
Abstract: The paper discusses the two cliticization strategies of the clitics in Macedonian tensed clauses: procliticization and encliticization. It is argued that, whenever a [+V, -N] host is available, the clitics are both syntactically and phonologically oriented towards that hostthey are true verbal clitics, which form an extended local domain with the verb, to the extent that, when the verb moves, the clitics go with it as free riders. Otherwise, the clitics are oriented towards the head of the clause, but share a restriction with second-position cliticslike the latter, they cannot appear in clause-initial position. The second strategy is actually a default strategy, resorted to when a [+V, -N] host is not available. Accordingly, in Macedonian, the non-first position is a default clitic position.
Contents
Articles
Ilija Casule
The Functional Load of the Short Pronominal Forms and the Doubling of the Object in Macedonian 3
Sung-ho Choi
Aspect and Negated Modality in Russian: Their Conceptual Compatibility 20
Lawrence E. Feinberg
An Automorphic Approach to Paradigm Structure: Toward a New Model of Russian Case Morphology 51
Keith Langston
Pitch Accent in Croatian and Serbian: Towards an Autosegmental Analysis 80
John R. Leafgren
Bulgarian Clitic Doubling: Overt Topicality 117
Remark
Vladimir Orel 'Freedom' in Slavic 144
Reviews
Robert Orr
Laura A. Janda. Back from the brink: A study of how relic forms in languages serve as source material for analogical extensions 150
Gilbert C. Rappaport
David K. Hart. Topics in the structure of Russian: An introduction to Russian linguistics 164
Gary H. Toops
Marek Nekula. System der Partikeln im Deutschen und Tschechischen: Unter besonderer Berucksichtigung der Abtonungspartikeln 175
Article Abstracts
Ilija Casule
The Functional Load of the Short Pronominal Forms and the Doubling of the Object in Macedonian
Abstract: The article analyses the causation of the doubling of the object in Macedonian (where it reaches its most extreme development in comparison to the other Balkan languages) and argues that it is due to fundamental, intralinguistic systemic develop-ments. In addition to the well-known factors, both synchronically and diachronically extensive syntactic and other argumentation is provided to substantiate the claim that the preverbal and sentence-initial position of the short pronominal forms is crucial in the development of the doubling of the object in Macedonian. The article claims that the position of the clitics is a result of a major historical syntactic change in the order of the constituents in Macedonian, whereby it was transformed from a SOV language into a SVO language, leaving the pronominal clitics on the left side of the verb as a consequence of this transformation. This restructuring gave the short pronominal forms a greater functional load (as markers of finiteness, transitivity, definiteness, etc) thus strengthening their syntactic position within the doubling of the object.
Sung-ho Choi
Aspect and Negated Modality in Russian: Their Conceptual Compatibility
Abstract: This paper examines aspectual choice in the context of two negated modal predicates, ne moã´ and nel´jza. It argues the following points: first, a quantity of empirical data disconfirms the traditional view of the association of morphological aspect (imperfective vs. perfective) with the "kind" (deontic vs. dynamic) or "degree" (non-necessity vs. impossibility) of modality. Second, lexical aspect, in particular the aspectual property of [telicity], plays a role in determining aspectual selection in these contexts. Third, ne moã´ behaves differently from nel´zja with respect to aspectual semantics; these two show the differences in usage and criteria conditioning aspect. It is demonstrated that this stems from the fact that the ne moã´ construction may be "agentive", while the nel´zja construction may not. Fourth, while for the syntagm"ne moã´ + telic infinitive" aspect selection is based upon the topological nature of the telic situation, for the syntagm "nel´zja + telic infinitive" aspect selection is determined by the modal meanings. The modal domain relevant for aspectual choice, however, turns out to be the "direction" of modality; "abductive" impossibility triggers the use of the imperfective, and "deductive" impossibility, the use of the perfective. Finally, it is suggested that the proposed correlation between aspect and negated modality may well be explained in terms of conditional relation holding between states of affairs.
Lawrence E. Feinberg
An Automorphic Approach to Paradigm Structure: Toward a New Model of Russian Case Morphology
Abstract: Previous approaches to Russian case morphology have generally assumed that form directly follows function, at least in the sense that the shape of desinences and paradigms may be specified in terms of a small set of semantic or syntactico-semantic features. This paper proposes that the relationship between case function and form is indirect&emdash;mediated by a template or master paradigm in which morphosyntactic properties such as Nom and Loc are encoded as positions in abstract space according two coordinates, anterior/posterior and exterior/interior. Nom, defined as anterior and exterior, constitutes the base line of the system, consistent with its status as "zero case". Morphological marking is primarily a function of distance from nom along each of the template dimensions, with secondary marking occurring where the basic hierarchy is attenuated: loc (posterior-interior) is most marked according to the primary hierarchy and instr (posterior-exterior) according to the secondary. Actual paradigms represent variant interpretations of the template, ranging from optimal (threefold asymmetrical: nom-acc/gen-loc-dat/instr) to minimal (direct/oblique). While previous analyses of Russian declension are content to specify case mergers and paradigms, the automorphic model allows us to motivate both the direction of syncretism and the division into paradigms. In this way many long-standing quandaries, such as how to accommodate gen2/loc2 within the overall system of forms, find plausible solutions.
Keith Langston
Pitch Accent in Croatian and Serbian: Towards an Autosegmental Analysis
Abstract: Pitch accent systems, such as that of standard Croatian and Serbian (Cr/S), pose a number of problems for any phonological analysis. Although an approach operating with nonlinear representations seems best suited to this type of system, relatively little research has been done on Cr/S within this framework. The most promising attempts to provide an autosegmental account of Cr/S accentuation are represented by the work of Zec and Inkelas. While adopting certain aspects of their approach, the present study argues that some of the basic assumptions of their analysis need to be reconsidered. An alternative analysis is proposed which differs from this previous work in a number of respects, including the identification of the tone-bearing unit in Cr/S and the way in which phonological and morphological rules interact, both issues of some general theoretical significance.
John R. Leafgren
Bulgarian Clitic Doubling: Overt Topicality
Abstract: The phenomenon in Bulgarian referred to here as "clitic doubling", in which a direct or indirect object is formally represented not by a single NP, but rather by a clitic personal pronoun cooccurring in one and the same clause with some other, coreferential NP type, is interesting not only for its formal characteristics, but also for its distributional, functional properties. This article presents an analysis of the function of this construction which both accounts for its distribution in a data base of literary prose fiction and explains why attempts to account for clitic doubling using notions such as definiteness, emphasis, and word order are almost, but not quite, successful. The proposed analysis, which assigns to clitic doubling the function of overtly marking the topicality of the object, also bears on the important linguistic issue of optionality in language and on the definition of "topic".
Vladimir Orel
'Freedom' in Slavic
Abstract: The Slavic word for 'freedom' is reconstructed as *sveboda and its etymologies are evaluated. A new solution is suggested, based on the hypothesis of an original adjective *svebodú 'wildly growing'. This form is compared with Slav *sverûpú 'wildly growing, wild, furious, fierce' with a similar derivational structure and original meaning. While the first component of *svebodú is identified with IE *suªe- , Slav *svoj¸, its second part, *-bodú, is compared with Slav *bodú, *bodakú and other words for 'thorn' and 'thistle'. Thus, *svebodú happens to be fairly close to *sverûpú, with its second component identical with Slav *rûpú 'thorn, burdock, thistle'. Both words describe the state of wild growth as 'having one's thorns to oneself' but their further semantic development is different. In *svebodú the original meaning 'wildly growing' changes into 'independent' and 'free', and then an abstract noun *sveboda is created from feminine nominative singular of this adjective.
1996
Contents
Articles
Per Durst-Andersen
Russian Case as Mood 177
Tracy Holloway King
Slavic Clitics, Long Head Movement, and Prosodic Inversion 274
Robert Orr
Against the *u°-Stems in Common Slavic 312
Karen E. Robblee
Effects of the Lexicon and Aspect on Nominative/Genitive Case Variation 344
Reviews
Maaike Schoorlemmer
Steven Franks. Parameters of Slavic Morphosyntax 370
Article Abstracts
Per Durst-Andersen
Russian Case as Mood
Abstract: Previous approaches to Russian case may be divided into four groups: 1) the atomistic tradition, which merely lists contextual meanings of the six cases in Russian; 2) the Jakobsonian tradition, which advocates the principle of invariance and operates with binary feature oppositions; 3) the GB tradition, which generally distinguishes two types of case: structural case and inherent case; and 4) the newer cognitivist tradition, which has totally abandoned the feature approach and instead operates with prototypes/core meanings and submeanings. The four theories are briefly examined and tested against various types of parameters and data. It is found that they do not meet realistic requirements for a theory of Russian case and that they are unable to handle the data adequately, instead confusing levels which should be separated and treating contextual meanings as case meanings. Specific requirements for a theory of Russian case are set up and against this background a new theory is constructed which is based on the assumption that an isomorphic relationship exists between the structure of the nominal system and the structure of the verbal system. It is argued that Russian case sensu stricto is the nominal equivalent to mood. The theory includes two different case systems: 1) the propositionally defined system, which involves deep syntax and is universal; here a distinction is made between casus exterior, i.e., cases which function as underlying subjects (nom, acc, and gen) and casus interior, i.e., cases which function as underlying determiners (dat, instr, and loc); and 2) the referentially defined system, which involves surface semantics and mood as well, and is the specific Russian contribution to case semantics. Here a distinction is made between direct cases (nom and acc) and oblique cases (voc, gen, dat, and instr)&emdash;the latter are further divided into outer cases (voc and gen) and inner cases (dat and instr). All previous theories have been concerned far more with the relationship of Russian case to the universal system, i.e., deep case, and far less with the specific Russian system, i.e., surface case. They have dealt with what could be called participant roles as opposed to case roles, and been unable to connect the pure case system and the prepositional system, where the distinction between contact cases (loc and acc) and non-contact cases (gen, dat, and instr) replaces the distinction between direct and oblique cases.
Tracy Holloway King
Slavic Clitics, Long Head Movement, and Prosodic Inversion
Abstract: This article investigates the distribution of clitic clusters in Bulgarian, Czech, Serbian-Croatian, and Slovak. It argues that clitic placement depends on both syntactic and prosodic factors. The syntactic factors include whether the clitic cluster is in I0 (verbal clitics) or C0 (second-position clitics) and whether there is a constituent which is a prosodic word, e.g., a complementizer or a topic, before the cluster. If the cluster is syntactically clause-initial, Prosodic Inversion occurs to provide a host for the clitics, resulting in the clitic cluster appearing after the first prosodic word in the clause. Differences among the languages reflect differences in where the clitic cluster is located syntactically and lexical differences in the clitic inventories and their prosodic properties. This analysis is contrasted with proposals arguing for Long Head Movement of participles to C0, and additional data involving optional participle movement, negation, and li questions are examined.
Robert Orr
Against the *u°-Stems in Common Slavic
Abstract: This paper discusses the composition of the *u°-stem class in Common Slavic. It is shown that if the lists of *u°-stems proposed in various specialist studies are combined with those found in more general works, nearly 150 nouns may be reconstructed as original *u°-stems, with varying degrees of probability. Forms usually neglected in the discourse (e.g., *kru°tu°-) can be shown to be almost certain original *u°-stems. Based mainly on cognates from Lithuanian, a similar number of adjectives may also be reconstructed as *u°-stems, giving a possible total of nearly 300. It is therefore proposed that the *u°-stems in Common Slavic were not a marginal class, but a fairly numerous, productive one, which strengthens the hypothesis of an early *u°-stem influence within the Common Slavic declensional system as a whole.
Karen E. Robblee
Effects of the Lexicon and Aspect on Nominative/Genitive Case Variation
Abstract: This paper examines case marking in Russian negative intransitive constructions, focusing on the lexicon and aspect. It treats two lexical hierarchies that together form a cline expressing the relative frequency of genitive case marking with different combinations of nouns and verbs. It thus demonstrates the extent to which case marking is predictable from the lexical content of sentences. The paper considers the effects of aspectual form and function, showing that submeanings of different morphological forms pattern together. This finding supports Timberlake's (1982) claim that morphological aspect has a limited role in the grammar of case, and that a grammatical description needs to include mapping rules from individual aspectual functions to morphological case.
Contents
Articles
Alina Israeli
Discourse Analysis of Russian Aspect: Accent on Creativity 8
James S. Levine and Charles Jones
Agent, Purpose, and Russian Middles 50
Rosemary Kuhn Plapp
Russian /i/ and /y/ as Underlying Segments 76
Tom Priestly
On the Etymology of the Ethnic Slur Tschusch 109
Michael Yadroff
Modern Russian Vocatives: A Case of Subtractive Morphology 133
Remarks
Vladimir Orel
Slavic *mo,do 'Testicle' 154
Oscar E. Swan
An Exercise in Ghost Forms: The Declension of OCS vepr' ~ vepr^' 'Boar' 159
Review
Martina Lindseth
Uwe Junghanns. Syntaktische und semantische Eigenschaften russischer finaler Infinitiveinbettungen 167
Miscellaneous
JSL Abbreviations 172
Article Abstracts
Alina Israeli
Discourse Analysis of Russian Aspect: Accent on Creativity
Abstract: Obshchefakticheskoe znachenie 'general factual meaning' (OF) has traditionally referred to imperfective usage that constitutes a simple reference to an action in the past. But over time many different variants have been included under this rubric, making the traditional definition inadequate. While the current working definition is a negative one (not process or repetition), the article attempts to give a new positive definition based on the discourse relationship of the speakers, namely a pragmatic contract. At the same time, the article demonstrates that in verbs denoting creative acts, a completely different set of parameters guides the usage of perfective vs. imperfective OF: mastermind/implementor, individual/joint project, [+/-authority].
James S. Levine and Charles Jones
Agent, Purpose, and Russian Middles
Abstract: Given a current theoretical analysis of passive and middle constructions in Russian (e.g., Babby 1993, within the Government and Binding syntactic theory), the question of what conditions affect the distribution of agent-oriented adverbs and clauses arises in an interesting way. In this paper we argue against the notion that lexical assignment of some kind of Agent thematic role to subject position is relevant to the distribution of these adjuncts. Instead, we offer an account of their distribution in terms of a more formal property of the argument structure of certain verbs; namely, the absence of lexically determined thematic content for the verb's characteristic external argument.
Rosemary Kuhn Plapp
Russian /i/ and /y/ as Underlying Segments
Abstract: The present paper provides evidence that /i/ and /y/ must be distinct underlying segments within a derivational analysis of modern Russian. In general /i/ occurs after palatalized [-back] consonants in Russian and /y/ appears after non-palatalized [+back] consonants. Superficially, postulating an allophonic alternation in high unrounded vowels seems appropriate. However, careful analysis of details of Russian phonology shows that this is not warranted. Evidence from velar and surface palatalization indicates that both /i/ and /y/ exist underlyingly in modern Russian. In fact, ordering paradoxes occur if one attempts to derive all high unrounded vowels from /i/. This analysis raises issues pertinent to Underspecification theory and Lexical Phonology.
Tom Priestly
On the Etymology of the Ethnic Slur Tschusch
Abstract: Several origins have been suggested for the German ethnic slur Tschusch, used (primarily in the meaning 'Slav') in present-day Austria since at least 1919, and formerly used in German-speaking parts of Moravia and Bohemia. Using evidence from a variety of sources, it is concluded that there are two quite separate origins: the two became confused in southern provinces of Austria, but probably only one is the source for the usages in Vienna and elsewhere. There remain gaps in the history of this/these word(s); in particular, the various reports of forms with postvocalic /zh/ remain unexplained.
Michael Yadroff
Modern Russian Vocatives: A Case of Subtractive Morphology
Abstract: This paper shows that Russian vocative formation poses problems for any templatic approach to truncation. Possible base forms for derivation of the vocatives are discussed and several arguments showing that it is a Nominative form and not a bare stem are presented. Vocative truncation is treated as a prosodic circumscription, i.e., deletion not of segments but of a prosodic unit (deprosodization); the output forms of vocatives are the result of subsequent resyllabification (reassociation of stranded onset consonants to the adjacent coda). In a sense, vocative formation is a mirror-image of Compensatory Lengthening: vocative formation reflects deletion of a prosodic unit with subsequent reassociation of segments, while Compensatory Lengthening reflects deletion of a segment with subsequent reassociation of a prosodic unit (mora).
Vladimir Orel
Slavic *mo,do 'Testicle'
Abstract: Various etymological interpretations of Slav *mo,do are analyzed and their formal and semantic inadequacy is demonstrated. A new etymology of *mo,do is tentatively suggested, linking this term to the Indo-European word for 'man' *manu- or *monu-. The suffix *-d- of *mo,do is studied in comparison with other Slavic derivatives in *-do, -d" from IE *dhe:- < *dheH-.
Oscar E. Swan
An Exercise in Ghost Forms: The Declension of OCS vepr' ~ vepr^' 'Boar'
Abstract: Two prominent dictionaries of Old Church Slavic assign the word vepr' 'boar' to the jo-stem declension, citing the gen sg ghost form veprja. There is as much reason to think that this word, cited only once in OCS, belonged to the i-stems.
1995
Contents
From the Editor 219
Charles E. Gribble
Reflections: Scholarly Publishers in Slavic Linguistics, or Why I Would Rather See than Be One 221
Articles
Sue Brown and Steven Franks
Asymmetries in the Scope of Russian Negation 239
Stephen M. Dickey
A Comparative Analysis of the Slavic Imperfective General-Factual 288
Gilbert Rappaport
Wh-Movement-in-Comp in Slavic Syntax and in Logical Form 308
Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby
The Effect of Discourse Functions on the Voice of Bidiathesis -sja Verbs 357
Reply
Zheng-Min Dong On Phonologically Null Prepositions: A Reply to Fowler and Yadroff 378
Review
David Hart
Tore Nesset. Russian Stress: Stress as an Inflectional Formative in Russian Noun Paradigms and Bybee's Cognitive Morphology 387
Bibliography
Loren Billings and Joan Maling.
Accusative-Assigning Participial -no/-to Constructions in Ukrainian, Polish, and Neighboring Languages: An Annotated Bibliography.
Article Abstracts
Sue Brown and Steven Franks
Asymmetries in the Scope of Russian Negation
Abstract: Russian ni-phrase Negative Polarity Items and the Genitive of Negation are not coextensive: the former must be in the scope of negation while the latter is restricted to direct objects, but does not show the scope requirement. These distributional asymmetries can be understood in terms of a functional category NegP analysis of sentential negation, where the negation operator resides in [Spec, NegP] and ne is its head. Several phenomena, including Negative Polarity Items, Relativized Minimality, and partitive genitives, are sensitive to the operator. Genitive of Negation, on the other hand, only requires there to be a NegP and for this reason can even occur in pleonastic contexts. Pleonastic negation, which we analyze as NegP with no negation operator, is canonically selected by certain verbs and adverbials, but is also syntactically forced in Yes/No questions with V-to-C raising.
Stephen M. Dickey
A Comparative Analysis of the Slavic Imperfective General-Factual
Abstract: This paper examines data from the Slavic languages concerning the general-factual use of the imperfective aspect. It is shown that the general-factual does not pattern identically in the individual Slavic languages, and that the difference can be concisely formulated in terms of Vendler's lexico-semantic predicate types: in the westernmost languages (Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, and Serbo-Croatian), achievements do not occur in the general-factual--the perfective aspect is required. In the eastern lang uages (Russian, Ukrainian, and Bulgarian) achievements are much more acceptable in the general-factual. On the basis of this distinction suggestions are made for definitions of aspectual semantics in the two halves of Slavic, utilizing the concepts of totality and temporal definiteness for the perfective, and temporal indefiniteness for the imperfective.
Gilbert Rappaport
Wh-Movement-in-Comp in Slavic Syntax and in Logical Form
Abstract: This paper supports the application of Wh-Movement-in-Comp in Logical Form to "undo" Pied Piping. More precisely, the general convention "Move Alpha" can apply on a recursive basis not only to a moved category as a whole (creating familiar cyclic chains), but within a moved category as well. First a case for Wh-Movement-in-Comp in Logical Form is sketched in terms of the Principles-and-Parameters theory of generative grammar. Then an empirical argument is developed, relying on an important h ypothesis of the theory: overt syntactic movement in a given language is a marked reflection of an isomorphic movement on a universal basis in Logical Form. Evidence is presented for Wh-Movement-in-Comp in Polish syntax, which entails the correspon ding mechanism in Logical Form. A brief survey of the relevant Slavic languages shows that some join Polish in exhibiting Wh-Movement-in-Comp, while others do not. The distinction can be traced to a difference in morphosyntactic typology involving the expression of the Specifier of NP.
Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby
The Effect of Discourse Functions on the Voice of Bidiathesis -sja Verbs
Abstract: This article reexamines the claim that verbs suffixed in -sja in Contemporary Standard Russian are distinguished by voice, i.e., imperfectives in -sja may be read as passives, while perfectives in -sja may not. Previous analyses have concluded that the perfective in -sja has an inchoative reading, i.e., is non-active, but non-passive, while the imperfective in -sja is the imperfective member of a passive aspect pair. The perfective member of the pair is a participial construction, composed of 'be' and a past passive participle of a perfective verb. The data in this paper show that passive readings of imperfective -sja are much more restricted than has been suggested previously. These limitations on the passive readings of both perfective and imperfective -sja predicates are examined in light of the Transitivity Hierarchy. The paper concludes that discourse functions, namely Transitivity Ranking and concomitant patient foregrounding, play a significant role in the likelihood that a predicate will be read as a passive in Russian. Discourse analysis offers an explanation for the limitations on the passive reading of -sja predicates, and supports the claim that these verbs are not distinguished by voice, as has often been suggested.
Zheng-Min Dong
On Phonologically Null Prepositions: A Reply to Fowler and Yadroff
Abstract: Fowler and Yadroff (1993) propose to explain the Russian use of the accusative case in duration phrases, as in vsju nedelju 'for a whole week', suggesting two separate accounts of such case assignment. This article presents arguments against their first hypothesis, that the accusative case is assigned by a null preposition, and provides additional evidence in support of the second approach, that the accusative case is intrinsic, or semantically independent.
Contents
Articles
John F. Bailyn
Underlying Phrase Structure and "ShortÓ Verb Movement in Russian 13
Robert Beard
The Gender-Animacy Hypothesis 59
Frank Y. Gladney
The Accent of Russian Verbforms 97
Kyril T. Holden and Monika A. Lozinska
The Function of Simplex and Derived Imperfectives in Russian: An Experimental Study 139
Remark
Vladimir Orel
Slavic *ryba ÔfishÕ 164
Reviews
Charles E. Townsend, Bernard Comrie and Greville G. Corbett
The Slavonic languages 170
Bibliography
Loren Billings and Joan Maling
Accusative-Assigning Participial -no/-to Constructions in Ukrainian, Polish, and Neighboring Languages: An Annotated Bibliography. Part 1: AøM 177
1994
Contents
Articles
Zbigniew Golab
Slavic chelovek" 'homo' against the Background of Proto-Slavic Social Terminology (201
Tore Nesset
A Feature-Based Approach to Russian Noun Inflection (214
Karen Robblee
Russian Word Order and the Lexicon 238
Remarks and Replies
David J. Birnbaum Why Isn't Dybo's Law Iterative? 268
Robert Greenberg Southwest Balkan Linguistic Contacts: Evidence from Appellative Language 273
Laura Janda and Victor A. Friedman
About the ja- in Makedonskiot Jazik: The Fate of Initial *e^- and *e,- in Macedonian 282
Tracy Holloway
King The Structure of Russian Clausal Negation 287
Jens Norgard-Sorensen
Reply to Dahl 298
Alexis Manaster-Ramer
A Remark on Initial Nasal Vowels in Polish 301
Review Article
Frank Y. Gladney
Jan Tokarski Redivivus 304
Reviews
Stuart Davis
Jerzy Rubach. The lexical phonology of Slovak 318
Stephen M. Dickey
Per Durst-Andersen. Mental grammar: Russian aspect and related issues 326
Victor A. Friedman
Grace E. Fielder. The semantics and pragmatics of verbal categories in Bulgarian 333
Herbert Galton
Anna Stunova. A contrastive study of Russian and Czech aspect: Invariance vs. discourse 341
Ingrid Maier
Laura A. Janda. A geography of case semantics: The Czech dative and the Russian instrumental 344
Petr Sgall
Eva Eckert, ed. Varieties of Czech: Studies in Czech sociolinguistics 353
Miscellaneous
JSL Style Sheet 359
Errata 367
Article Abstracts
Zbigniew Golab
Slavic chelovek" 'homo' against the Background of Proto-Slavic Social Terminology
Abstract: This article reviews the published literature on the etymology of Slavic *chelovek" 'homo' and proposes that this Slavic word should be derived from Indo-European *kuelo-uoik'o-s, cf. Greek peri-oikos. Support for this proposal can be found in the etymology of the components of the compound, the structural pattern of its composition, and its relationship to the subsystem of other Slavic social terms.
Tore Nesset
A Feature-Based Approach to Russian Noun Inflection
Abstract: The present paper examines the traditional approaches to Russian noun inflection where two, three, or four declension classes are assumed. Two descriptive problems are considered: gender predictability and neutralization of the oppositions between declension classes. It is demonstrated that none of the traditional approaches offer fully satisfactory accounts for both problems, and a new approach involving the use of two features is therefore proposed.
Karen Robblee
Russian Word Order and the Lexicon
Abstract: This paper investigates the interaction of lexicosemantics with Russian word order, reporting a significant divergence in the word order patterns of sentences with different types of predicates. Predicates fall on a lexical hierarchy of individuation that correlates with their tendency to occur with the verb preceding the subject in the sentence, i.e., with word-order configurations CVS, VCS, VSC, and VS. Those of low lexical individuation occur with VS-inversion more frequently than those of high lexical individuation. VS-inversion has one primary (existential) function, and two secondary (episode-marking and specificational) functions. The primary function is a deindividuating function, subject to minimal restrictions. The secondary functions, in contrast, are limited by predicate type and location in the narrative. Individuation features relating to secondary function, predicate type, and section of narrative covary.
David J. Birnbaum
Why Isn't Dybo's Law Iterative?
Abstract: Dybo's Law, the advance of ictus from syllables of a certain type in Common Slavic, is not iterative. This non-iterative property is a natural consequence of an autosegmental analysis of Dybo's Law (as in Halle and Kiparsky 1981), but not of the traditional, non-autosegmental description (as in Garde 1976).
Robert Greenberg
Southwest Balkan Linguistic Contacts: Evidence from Appellative Language
Abstract: This study discusses several of the traditional and non-traditional "Balkan" isoglosses as manifested in a Southwest Balkan Sprachbund consisting of Western Macedonian, Albanian, Romance, and Zeta-Lovcen Montenegrin dialects. Some of the most convincing evidence pointing to such a linguistic continuum is found in the appellative forms, i.e., imperatives, vocatives, and emphatic/exhorative particles. This evidence suggests that further research could lead to a redefinition of "Balkanness" with regard to the South Slavic dialects.
Laura Janda and Victor A. Friedman
About the ja- in Makedonskiot Jazik: The Fate of Initial *e^- and *e,- in Macedonian
Abstract: The change of initial *e^- to ja- has been overlooked in historical phonologies of Macedonian, yet is well attested. The present analysis provides a route for initial *e,- which changed to e^- to develop further to ja-, avoiding the phonologically implausible nasal merger and positing no additional sound changes without independent motivation.
Tracy Holloway King
The Structure of Russian Clausal Negation
Abstract: The present article argues that the Russian negative marker ne does not head it own functional projection in the structure of a clause. Instead, it is argued that ne forms a unit with the tensed verb in its clause. As a result, negation has scope over the tensed verb in I^0 and the material in VP, but not over other finite elements. Arguments in support of this position are based upon facts of the scope of negation and the genitive of negation.
Jens Norgard-Sorensen
Reply to Dahl
Abstract not available
Alexis Manaster-Ramer
A Remark on Initial Nasal Vowels in Polish
Abstract: Gussmann (1993) claims that nasal vowels are absolutely impossible word-initially in Polish. In response, I discuss various counterexamples, involving both attested forms and unattested but possible ones.
Contents
From the Editors 1
Catherine V. Chvany
Reflections: Slavic Linguistics: The View from France 2
Articles
David R. Andrews
The Russian Color Categories Sinij and Goluboj 9
Tania Avgustinova
On Bulgarian Verb Clitics 29
Dunstan P. Brown and Andrew R. Hippisley
Conflict in Russian Genitive Plural Assignment 48
Herbert Galton
The Phonological Influence of Altaic on Slavic 77
Tracy Halloway
King Focus in Russian Yes-No Questions 92
Cynthia Vakareliyska
Na-Drop in Bulgarian 121
Remarks and Replies
Rémi Camus
Eshche raz = n + 1: Repetition as Counting Off 151
Alexis Manaster-Ramer On Three East Slavic Non-Counterexamples to Stieber's Law 164
Reviews
Osten Dahl
Jens Norgard-Sorensen. Coherence theory: The Case of Russian 171
Edmund Gussman
Christina Y. Bethin. Polish syllables: The role of prosody in phonology and morphology 178
Article Abstracts
David R. Andrews
The Russian Color Categories Sinij and Goluboj
Abstract: Earlier relativist notions about color naming have yielded to the recognition that color categorization is a linguistic universal. The first comprehensive argument for universality is made by Berlin and Kay (1969), who propose a total possible inventory of eleven basic color categories. Subsequent work in bilingualism and prototype theory has led to refinements of Berlin and Kay's original thesis. This paper, which includes a formal color experiment, examines the treatment of the Russian color terms sinij 'dark blue' and goluboj 'light blue' within the framework of this research. The experiment includes informants from four groups: 1) Soviet Russians; 2) adult emigre acutes; 3) young adults who emigrated during childhood; and 4) Americans tested in English. Results suggest that sinij and goluboj are bona-fide basic terms in standard Russian and that this treatment is fixed by adulthood. Among the younger emigre acutes, however, there is definite evidence of semantic shift, the result of interference from English blue. The experiment helps confirm the theory of basic color categories as well as its addenda and revisions.
Tania Avgustinova
On Bulgarian Verb Clitics
Abstract: An analysis of clitic word order is proposed, based on the division of Bulgarian verb-complex clitics into core and peripheral with respect to the clitic cluster formation. Taking into account inherent prosodic properties, the treatment of the "movable" core clitics is separated from that of the peripheral strictly proclitic and strictly enclitic elements, which allows for attribution of apparently problematic clitic placements to the interaction of the two types.
Dunstan P. Brown and Andrew R. Hippisley
Conflict in Russian Genitive Plural Assignment
Abstract: Inflectional endings are assigned in languages by general principles, but these can come into conflict. We address the question of how such conflict is resolved. A particularly complex example is the Russian genitive plural, where we find that with soft-stem nouns there is a conflict between exponent assignment according to declension class and a default exponent assignment for soft-stem nouns. What is specially interesting is that the conflict here can be resolved by reference to subsystems over and above the paradigm, such as stress. We present an explicit account of the conflict and its mediation by basing our study on default inheritance. For this purpose we make use of the lexical knowledge representation language DATR. This allows us to demonstrate in the output provided that the correct forms are indeed predicted by our theory.
Herbert Galton
The Phonological Influence of Altaic on Slavic
Abstract: Slavic, as represented by Old Church Slavonic, exhibits a curious parallelism of "hard" and "soft" declensions based on the final consonant of the stem, which may be neutral or palatal. Many endings then begin with back versus front vowels. This is a most un-Indo-European feature, for IE is supposed to have had only one set of endings per declensional type, and suggests some strong phonetic influence on the emerging Slavic language, which is most likely to have come from the Huns or Avars, probably Turkic -speaking peoples, who dominated the Slavs between ca. 400-800 A.D. In their agglutinative language, front or back vowels in the stem require corresponding front or back vowels in all suffixes, and the process of attachment also affects the intervening co nsonants. In some consonants, such as velars and laterals, this effect is particularly marked, and there is a curious back counterpart of front /i/, a vowel like the Russian /y/, which is quite un-Indo-European. Its source as well as that of the three suc cessive palatalizations which set off Slavic from its Baltic matrix is probably to be sought in an Altaic influence which asserted itself in Slavs seeking to imitate the speech habits of their Altaic masters and military commanders. The grammatical system was not imitated on anything like this scale, but more words than commonly realized were borrowed, including the very name of the Slavs.
Tracy Halloway King
Focus in Russian Yes-No Questions
Abstract: This paper examines the structure of li yes-no questions and the distribution of focused elements in them. Li is a clitic complementizer which assigns a focus feature. If Spec-head agreement occurs, a maximal projection moves to SpecCP, where it is the focus of the question and hosts the clitic. If no maximal projection moves to SpecCP, then the verb in I^0 undergoes head-movement to C^0 in order to host the clitic. In these verb-initial structures, the entire clause is questioned. If the clause contains a focused constituent marked by stress, then that constituent is the focus of the question; the resulting reading is similar to what would result if the focused constituent had moved to SpecCP. However, if there is no stressed, focused constituent, the result is a "simple" yes-no question.
Cynthia Vakareliyska
Na-Drop in Bulgarian
Abstract: The article examines the syntactic phenomenon of na-drop, its distribution, and its implications for the nature of object doubling in Bulgarian. Na-drop is the optional omission in colloquial Bulgarian of the dative marker na from the object NP in a dative reduplicative sentence. That the dative pronominal clitic (PC) in such constructions operates as the sole dative marker for the reduplicated object NP suggests that Bulgarian doubling PCs in general may have a strong case-marking function. Testing with 23 native speakers shows that na-drop is tolerated well beyond its historical environment (doubling of 1sg and 2sg long-form pronouns). The subjects as a group found na-drop acceptable, to varying degrees, throughout the personal pronoun paradigm and with reduplicated object nouns and personal names. A major factor influencing acceptability was the position of the reduplicated object NP in the sentence. Tentative results also suggest a higher tolerance of na-drop in impersonal sentences.
Rémi Camus
Eshche raz = n + 1: Repetition as Counting Off
Abstract: English translation of a sample entry from the Dictionnaire des mots du discours en russe contemporain, providing a full description of the discouse functions of the collocation eshche raz.
Alexis Manaster-Ramer
On Three East Slavic Non-Counterexamples to Stieber's Law
Abstract: Three examples from East Slavic which have been cited as evidence that analogy can produce new phonemes are reexamined. It turns out that in each case the forms in question can be naturally explained as borrowings from a dialect in which the "new" phonemes had arisen by regular sound change into dialects without these phonemes.
1993
Contents
Articles
Edna Andrews
Interpretants and Linguistic Change: The Case of -x- in Contemporary Standard Colloquial Russian 199
Christina Bethin
Neo-Acute Length in the North Central Dialects of Late Common Slavic 219
George Fowler and Michael Yadroff
The Argument Status of Accusative Measure Nominals in Russian 251
Steven Franks and Katarzyna Dziwirek
Negated Adjunct Phrases are really Partitive 280
Kevin Hannan
Analogical Change in West Slavic Be 306
William Mahota
The Genitive Plural Endings in the East Slavic Languages 325
Stefan M. Pugh
More on Glides in Contemporary Standard Russian: The Loss of Intervocalic /j/ and /v/ 343
Reviews
Henrik Birnbaum
On the Ethnogenesis and Protohome of the Slavs: The Linguistic Evidence 352
Charles E. Townsend
Terence R. Carlton. Introduction to the Phonological History of the Slavic Languages 375
Article Abstracts
Edna Andrews
Interpretants and Linguistic Change: The Case of -x- in Contemporary Standard Colloquial Russian
Abstract: The following analysis deals with the appearance of /x/ in nominal lexemes where it would seem to be unmotivated (cf. kartoxa, Toxa, etc.). The occurrence of /x/ has several potential motivations, including: 1) the morphophonemic consonantal alternation x/s#; or 2) examples of the nominal suffix -x. The solution to this problem is established as a result of a detailed semantic analysis of all /x/-based nominal suffixes ({-ix-(a)}, {-ux-(a)}, { -ox-(a)}, {-ax-(a)}, and {-x-(a)}) and a description of derivational rules for lexemes in /x/. In order to present this analysis in its proper theoretical framework, the principles of linguistic sign theory, and, in particular, Peircean categories of inference and signs, are applied in articulating the specific principles that define diachronic linguistic change. The conclusions include statements concerning productivity of morphemes and the interrelationship between form and meaning.
Christina Bethin
Neo-Acute Length in the North Central Dialects of Late Common Slavic
Abstract: The shift of stress known as the neo-acute retraction took place in the context of emerging prosodic differences in Late Common Slavic (LCS). By recognizing that LCS dialects were differentiating in terms of whether they took the mora or the syllable as their prosodic domain, and by recognizing differences in syllable structure and their metrical implications, it is possible to account for the reflexes of the neo-acute retraction in the various dialects of LCS in a fairly principled way. The chronology of tone loss and the neo-acute retraction is particularly important in the North Central LCS dialects because this area does not preserve pitch accent, though differences in compensatory lengthening have been attributed to the effect of accent. I propose that what has been called "neo-acute lengthening" before weak jers in the North Central dialects was actually pretonic lengthening, and that it represents an attempt to maintain a certain metrical organization, the trochaic metrical foot, which was emerging in this area of LCS.
George Fowler and Michael Yadroff
The Argument Status of Accusative Measure Nominals in Russian
Abstract: This paper is a contribution to the theory of bare-NP adverbs based on an analysis of Accusative measure nominals in Russian. Duration phrases are classified into three discrete groups: arguments (with verbs like provesti `spend [time]'), quasi-arguments (with verbs in pro- and certain other prefixes), and non-arguments (other Accusative duration phrases), on the basis of the features [+, - theta-role] and [+, - referential]. It is established that case must be assigned to duration phrases independently of the verb. Two possible competing analyses of the mechanism of case assignment are proposed. One analysis relies upon a base-generated functional category of Case, with a distribution parallel to prepositions. The second analysis posits a null preposition that assigns case to duration phrases.
Steven Franks and Katarzyna Dziwirek
Negated Adjunct Phrases are really Partitive
Abstract: This article examines genitive measure adverbials (adjuncts), which occur in various Slavic languages in the context of sentential negation. Although this phenomenon resembles the genitive of negation, it is argued that such adverbials do not result from the genitive of negation rule, and are instead partitives. Polish and Russian data are employed to support this idea on semantic grounds, the "optionality" of both depending on whether or not there is a partitive interpretation. The primary mode of argumentation, however, is comparative. The claim that genitive adjuncts are really partitives is supported by a range of data drawn from a variety of Slavic languages. These data show that for any given language the status of the genitive adjunct construction is comparable to that of the partitive construction rather than to that of the genitive of negation construction. This state of affairs is obscured in Russian, where the three phenomena are equally felicitous. If one looks beyond East Slavic, however, the felicity of the genitive of negation and partitive diverges, making it possible to identify the true nature of these genitive adjuncts.
Kevin Hannan
Analogical Change in West Slavic Be
Abstract: The remodeling of present indicative be in dialects of Polish, Czech, and Slovak illustrates two different processes of analogical change. First, as seen in a variety of paradigmatic patterns from dialects of Silesia, Little Poland, Moravia, and Slovakia, 3rd-person forms were reinterpreted as the root of the paradigm. Second, preterite enclitics served as a model for new present-tense 1st-person enclitics -ch, -chmy. The geographic spread of these developments, which date to the late 15th and the 16th centuries, suggests the influence of southern Polish dialects. Such examples of analogical change present a means of typologically distinguishing the dialects which are spatially located within the center of the West Slavic dialect continuum from the peripheral dialects.
William Mahota
The Genitive Plural Endings in the East Slavic Languages
Abstract: Although Belorussian, Ukrainian, and Russian all have the genitive plural desinences {-ov}, {-ej}, and -O, their distribution in these languages varies substantially. This is in part due to analogical leveling to {-ov} in neuter and feminine substantives in Belorussian, and to the different ways in which stem-final hard and soft consonants correlate with the selection of desinences in each language. The consequences of the analogical spread of {-ov} are both morphophonemic (restriction of vowel-zero alternations in certain Belorussian stems, accentual modifications in Ukrainian), and semantic (markedness reversal and semantic marking with an unexpected desinence in all three). The spread of {-ov} to nouns of all genders both in the standard languages and in the dialects also represents the final stage of the loss of gender distinctions in the oblique plural cases of these languages, a process which was completed in the other oblique cases several centuries ago.
Stefan M. Pugh
More on Glides in Contemporary Standard Russian: The Loss of Intervocalic /j/ and /v/
Abstract: The loss of the glide /j/ in intervocalic position is a common occurrence in colloquial Russian; data show that this phenomenon is not restricted to substandard speech. The fricative /v/ enters into a close relationship with /j/, e.g., in Flier's "glide shift". This paper shows that the loss of /v/ in intervocalic position closely parallels the loss of /j/. Therefore it is more appropriate to regard /v/ as a glide like [w] rather than an obstruent, as is traditional in Russian phonemics.
Contents
Articles
Leonard Babby
A Theta-Theoretic Analysis of -en- Suffixation in Russian 3
Ronald Feldstein
The Nature and Use of the Accentual Paradigm as Applied to Russian 44
Frank Gladney
R stanovitsja 'stands up' and +i Imperfective Thematization 61
Eric P. Hamp
OCS velii-velikyi and -ok"- 80
Marvin Kantor
On the "Desire" to Hunt 83
Margaret Mills
On Russian and English Pragmalinguistic Requestive Strategies 92
Ljiljana Progovac
Locality and Subject-like Complements in Serbo-Croatian 116
Oscar Swan
Notionality, Referentiality, and the Polish Verb Be 145
Adger Williams
The Argument Structure of sja-Predicates 167
Review
Herbert Galton
Boris Hlebec. Aspects, phases and tenses in English and Serbo-Croatian 191
Article Abstracts
Leonard Babby
A Theta-Theoretic Analysis of -en- Suffixation in Russian
Abstract not available
Ronald Feldstein
The Nature and Use of the Accentual Paradigm as Applied to Russian
Abstract not available
Frank Gladney
Russian stanovitsja 'stands up' and +i Imperfective Thematization
Abstract: Russian stanovitsja 'stands up' is the -i- imperfective of stanet, not the -sja intransitive of stanovit. It is like saditsja 'sit down' and lozhitsja 'lie down', which are likewise -i- imperfectives (cf. sjadet, ljazhet), not, as the accent shows (cf. sadit, -lozhit), -sja intransitives. With stanet, stanovitsja shares thematic -n-, which conditions thematic -ov- as it does in ischeznovenie, dunovenie, etc. Although thematic -i- has imperfectivizing force in the prefixed imperfectives nosit, -vodit, -vozit, and -xodit, it does not have it with prefixed -stanovit. Hence in prefixed use sta- has tended to replace -nov- with productive thematizations.
Eric P. Hamp
OCS velii-velikyi and -ok"
Abstract: Building on Mares's demonstration that velii and velikyi are equally old and differ as +/-definite, *-ko- is thus seen to be semantically empty, i.e. the element I have identified in ú-stem adjectives and jabl"ko. This *-ko- with an alternant *-Hko- is then equated with IE *-H{o}k{^w}o- (BSLP 68, 77-92, 1973) 'facing, appearing', and this equation then explains the suffix of adjectives of extent such as vysòk", shiròk". A new etymology of Albanian plak 'old man', with a different *-ko-, is given.
Marvin Kantor
On the "Desire" to Hunt
Abstract not available
Margaret Mills
On Russian and English Pragmalinguistic Requestive Strategies
Abstract not available
Ljiljana Progovac
Locality and Subjective-Like Complements in Serbo-Croatian
Abstract: Verbs in Serbo-Croatian fall into two basic classes: those which select opaque complements (henceforth I-verbs, or Indicative-selecting verbs), and those which select transparent complements, allowing for domain extension (henceforth S-verbs, selecting Subjunctive-like complements). I-verbs are mostly verbs of saying and believing, whereas S-verbs are mainly verbs of wishing or requesting. The following dependencies are clause-bound with I-verbs, but can cross clause boundaries with S-verbs: lincensing of Negative Polarity Items, clitic climbing, and topic preposing. In addition, wh-movement in questions and relative clauses uses different strategies with I- and S-verbs.
The transparency of S-verbs correlates closely with their inability to select independent (uncontrolled) tense in their complements. I will propose that S-verbs allow domain extension by virtue of licensing deletion of Infl and Comp material in their comp lements at the level of Logical Form (LF). Such deletion will be possible with S-verbs, whose complements have recoverable Tense features, but not with I-verbs, whose complements host independent Tense. I will assume that the same mechanism can explain do main extension with subjunctive clauses in general.
Oscar Swan
Notionality, Referentiality, and the Polish Verb 'Be'
Abstract not available
Adger Williams
The Argument Structure of sja-Predicates
Abstract not available