Wörter im Grenzbereich von Lexikon und Grammatik im Serbokroatischen

Snjezana Kordic
Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universitaet Muenster

Um einen Beitrag zur serbokrotistischen Lexikographie und Grammatikschreibung zu leisten, werden in diesem Buch syntaktische, semantische, pragmatische und lexikographische Aspekte einiger Pronomen, Partikeln, Konjunktionen und Verben in der modernen serbokroatischen Sprache beschrieben. Die Klasse solcher - verschiedenen Wortarten angehoerenden - Einheiten, die im Sprachsystem eine Position zwischen volllexikalischen Woertern und Funktionswoertern einnehmen, umfasst noch weitere Woerter - fuer dieses Buch sind nur diejenigen unter ihnen ausgesucht worden, zu denen die Woerterbuecher und Grammatiken des Serbokroatischen aeußerst mangelhafte oder sogar keine Beschreibung bieten. Die gegenwaertige Situation zu ueberwinden, waere um so wichtiger, als jedes zehnte Wort im Sprachgebrauch eines dieser Woerter ist.

Die ersten drei Kapitel beschaeftigen sich mit den semantischen, grammatischen und pragmatischen Eigenschaften der Personalpronomen ja/ti/on usw. 'ich/du/er', mit dem Hoeflichkeitsausdruck durch das Personalpronomen Vi 'Sie' und mit dem Verallgemeinerungsausdruck durch das pronominalisierte Substantiv covjek 'man'. Die naechsten drei Kapitel sind den Demonstrativ-pronomen ovaj/taj/onaj 'dieser/jener', den Demonstrativwoertern evo/eto/eno 'sieh da' und der zusammengesetzten Konjunktion tim više što 'um so mehr/weniger als' gewidmet. In den letzten zwei Kapiteln geht es um die Verben imati 'haben', biti 'sein' und trebati 'brauchen/sollen'. Am Ende des jeweiligen Kapitels wird ein Modell zur grammatischen und lexikographischen Beschreibung der behandelten Woerter vorgeschlagen. Die betreffenden Spracheinheiten des Serbokroatischen werden im Buch verschiedentlich mit entsprechenden Einheiten anderer slavischen Sprachen verglichen.

ISBN 9783895869549. LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 18. 340pp. 2001.

Genesis of the Slovak Literary Language

Konstantin Vasilievich Lifanov
Lomonosov State University of Moscow

Contrary to Slovak historical linguistics, the Slovak Literary Language did not arise in the 18th century as a result of Anton Bernolak's codification of the West Slovak dialect. It developed gradually, over a much longer period of time from the Old Czech Literary Language, which was adopted by the Slovaks as their own written medium as early as by the end of the 14th century. As a result of its interaction with mainly the West Slovak dialect, its specific Slovak version arose in the 15th century. By the 1630s, this written standard acquired the features of an original literary language, separate from the literary language based on the Prague standard.

However, since the first decades of the 17th century, a further development of this written standard was complicated by the Counter-Reformation. The use of the literary language followed different paths among the Lutherans and among the Catholics. The Old Slovak Literary Language attained a high degree of development among the Catholics. Rich and varied spiritual literature was written in this language, including a translation of the Bible in 1750, high-quality secular baroque poetry, etc. In the 1780s, this standard was codified by Bernolak.

Diglossia emerged among the Lutherans. They used both the Czech Literary Language and the Old Slovak Literary Language. However, they did not perceive the latter one as a literary norm and considered it acceptable only in the "low" kinds of literature -- e.g., in popular poetry -- and in administrative and legal documents. This diglossia was not abolished until the 1820s, which opened the way for Ludovit Stur's codification of the Modern Slovak Literary Language based on the Central Slovak folklore koine.

Contents: Introduction. Chapter 1. The main thesis of the general theory of literary language. Chapter 2. The formation of specific idiom functioning in Catholic spiritual literature of the XVIth - XVIIIth centuries and Bernolak's codification. Chapter 3. Interrelation of Catholic "high" poetry language of the XVIIth - XVIIIth centuries and the language of spiritual literature. Chapter 4. The character of territorial differentiation and the evolution of the language of Slovak administrative-legal documents. Chapter 5. Central Slovak koine and the language of poetry from the end of XVIIIth to the beginning of the XIXth centuries. Chapter 6. A new concept of the genesis of the Slovak Literary language. Conclusion. [written in Russian]

ISBN 9783895864421. LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 21. 220pp. 2001.

The Semantics and Discourse Function of Habitual-Iterative Verbs in Contemporary Czech

David S. Danaher
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Studies of grammaticalized iterative forms in the Slavic languages are scarce, and those that do exist are mostly focused on questions of derivation or historical development and rarely explore the meaning and function of the verb forms in any depth. The present study examines Czech, the Slavic language in which habitual-iterative verbs are most frequently used and most integrated into the overall system of tense, aspect, and modality.
Grounded in a corpus of examples taken from contemporary literary Czech and making use of recent work in both semiotic (Peircean) and cognitive approaches to language, it demonstrates why feature-based accounts of the meaning of the iterative form prove inadequate and how a broader perspective on the question, which takes a semiotic and cognitive definition of habit as its starting point, contributes to a clearer understanding of iteration as it is encoded in language.
The study "re-cognizes" the semantics of the habitual-iterative gram in Czech by showing how the various meanings and functions of the verb are coherently related to each other given what is involved in the conceptualization of a habit. In this regard, the linguistic expression of habituality is productively viewed as a token of a larger type of cognitive evaluation that can be termed habitual.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Epigraphs
Introduction

Chapter 1
An Overview of the Corpus

Chapter 2
The Scholarly Context:
Kopecn, Airokova, Kucera, and Filip

Chapter 3
A Semiotic and Cognitive Approach to the Linguistic Expression of Habituality

Chapter 4
Habitual Verbs and Conceptual Distancing

Chapter 5
The Discourse Function of Habitual Verbs

Chapter 6
A Typology of Iteration

Bibliography

ISBN 9783895864537. LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 22. 200pp. 2003.

The Phonology of Stress in Polish

Iwona Kraska-Szlenk
University of Warsaw

This book examines the Polish stress system within the theoretical framework of Optimality Theory (OT). Two aspects of stress, its position and its relative prominence, are discussed in a broader context of domain structuring in Polish. General theoretical questions are also addressed, e.g. the formal treatment of clitics, lexical exceptions, analogy.

The introductory chapter one outlines the principles of OT and the basic facts of Polish morphology and syllabification relevant to stress. Chapter two presents a discussion of a general foot pattern within a domain of the word, including compounds, lexical exceptions and acronyms. The most elaborated chapter three is devoted to an intricate problem of stress patterns in clitic groups. A complex interaction between the position of metrical feet, syllabification and sandhi effects (final devoicing, voicing assimilations) necessitates a novel approach to the issue of prosodic domains in Polish, which are assumed to be constraint-based. Peculiar behavior of some clitics argues for their preferable unstressability which may be, however, violated under a higher demand. The foot pattern in proclitic groups calls for a recourse to analogy for which an OT analysis is given (additionally motivated by examples of paradigmatic leveling and reduplication).

In the final chapter four a grid representation is used to reflect relative differences between primary, secondary and subsidiary stresses. A four-way stress contrasts attested for Polish phrases are predicted by a grid-building family of constraints which coexists with a foot-building family of constraints dicussed in the previous chapters. The Polish data are examined in detail, but some comparison to other languages is also made in order to argue for the universal character of grid constraints.

ISBN 9783895867255. LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 23. 120pp. 2003.

Genus als grammatische und textlinguistische Kategorie

Eine kognitiv-funktionalistische Untersuchung des Russischen

Ursula Doleschal
Universität Klagenfurt

Die vorliegende Studie behandelt die grammatische Kategorie "Genus" im Russischen aus einer universalistischen Perspektive. Die Hauptziele der Arbeit sind erstens, ein psychologisch reales, einheitliches Modell sowohl von Genuszuweisung als auch Genuskongruenz vorzulegen, und zweitens, eine empirische Untersuchung der textlinguistischen Funktionen von Genus zuerbringen.

Das erste Kapitel umreißt die typologischen Aspekte von Genus und die Stelle von Russisch als Genussprache. Im zweiten und dritten Kapitel werden die morphologischen Aspekte des Genus im Russischen sowie die entsprechenden Kongruenzdomänen anhand authentischer Beispiele beschrieben. Das vierte Kapitel ist der Modellierung der Kategorie "Genus" im Russischen gewidmet. Zunächst werden frühere Darstellungen diskutiert. Darauf aufbauend wird ein neues Modell der Genuszuweisung vorgeschlagen. Die Modellierung basiert auf morphologischen und semantischen Schemata, wie sie in der Kognitiven Linguistik verwendet werden. Auf diese Weise wird Genuszuweisung als komplexe Interaktion von semantischen und morphologischen Eigenschaften von Substantiven analysiert. In der Folge wird dargelegt, daß auch die Genuskongruenz durch Anwendung derselben Schemata auf einer hierarchisch höheren Ebene beschrieben werden kann. Im fünften Kapitel wird schließlich anhand eines Textkorpus der russischen Umgangssprache und russischer Zeitungen die Funktion von Genus im Diskurs untersucht. Es wird gezeigt, daß Genus tatsächlich eine Rolle bei der Referenzherstellung und Referenzverfolgung spielt.

The present study deals with the grammatical category of gender in Russian from a universalist point of view. The main aims are to provide, firstly, a psychologically real, unified model of both gender assignment and agreement and, secondly, an empirical investigation of the textlinguistic functions of gender.

The first chapter shortly outlines the typological aspects of gender and the place of Russian among other gender languages.

The second and third chapters delineate the morphological aspects of gender in Russian and the respective agreement domains, illustrating both with authentic examples.

The fourth chapter is devoted to modelling the category of gender in Russian. In the beginning previous accounts are discussed. Subsequently, a new account of gender assignment is put forward. This analysis is based on morphological and semantic schemata as used in Cognitive linguistics, rendering gender assignment of Russian as a complex interplay of semantic and morphological features of nouns. It is then argued that gender agreement can be described using the same set of schemata at a higher hierarchical level.

In the end, the fifth chapter investigates the function of gender in discourse, drawing on a large corpus of data from both colloquial Russian and Russian newspapers. It is shown that gender does indeed play a role for both establishing reference and reference-tracking.[Written in German].

ISBN 9783895863134. (Hardbound) LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 24. 257 S. 2004.

The Language of Eastern Slovak Publications in the USA

(the End of 19th – the Beginning of 20th Centuries)

Konstantin V. Lifanov
Lomonosov State University of Moscow

This paper is the first attempt for linguistic analysis of the specific language of published texts (newspapers, English grammar and tale) written in the USA by Slovak immigrants at the threshold of the 20th century. The language of these texts has been uninvestigated till present but there is an opinion they were created in the Eastern Slovak dialect. In fact, there are many diverse Eastern Slovak phonetic and morphological features in its structure, but they compete corresponding with the Slovak literary language ones. In this connection this language may be identified as a mixture arisen as a consequence of of Eastern Slovak and Slovak literary language interaction.

The Slovak literary language and the Eastern Slovak have different positions in the Slovak American publications, because the first idiom is considered as a phenomenon of indivisible whole. On the contrary, the Eastern Slovak functions as a certain generalization of its components competing not only with Slovak literary language, but also each other. In this case the Slovak literary language often plays a part of peculiar filter, which assists their penetration into the structure of these texts or prevents from it.

The rules of the Slovak literary language continue to be used in the language of the Slovak American publications, but they are modified under influence of the Eastern Slovak. However, it enables to conclude the Slovak literary language was just the base of the language of the Slovak American publications.

The language of the Charter of “The First Hungarian-Slovak Society Supported in the Case of Illness” published in 1887 in New York essentially differs from other Slovak American publications, because the Eastern Slovak dialect actually was its base.

Contents :

Introduction

Chapter 1. Eastern Slovak dialect in the structure of Slovak publications in the USA

Chapter 2. Competition of Eastern Slovak features in the Slovak American publications

Chapter 3. Mechanism of interaction of the Slovak literary language and Eastern Slovak dialect and the influence of other languages

Chapter 4. The language of the Charter of “The First Hungarian-Slovak Society Supported in the Case of Illness”

Conclusions

Bibliography

Appendix. Fragments of the texts from the Eastern Slovak publications in the USA

ISBN 9783895864827. LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 25. 110pp. 2005.

A History of the Russian Language and its Speakers

Ian Press
University of St Andrews

The history of the emergence of any standard and therefore at least initially somewhat artificial language is complex, but that of Russian is perhaps exceptionally so, with argument simmering for many years over the character, extent and relevance of variation. An attempt is made to present both the history of the language and of its users, in this way bringing the whole general picture together. The earliest days, with the emergence of writing, are explored, after which language use in Rus' is examined. Russian from the Mongol Conquest to Muscovy and the social and linguistic reshapings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are seen as creating a base whose stability is worked through over the next few generations.

A standard emerges in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but remains exploratory throughout the nineteenth century, since when we have the October Revolution and its impact on language, followed by the current 'liberation' of Russian. The picture is brought to life by the inclusion of texts, with commentaries, from all periods. The aim is to provide a clear, readable, and accessible presentation for a wide range of readers.

ISBN 9783895868061 (Hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 26. 390pp. 2007.

A New Historical Grammar of the East Slavic Languages

Volume 1: Introduction and Phonology

Stefan M. Pugh
University of St Andrews

A New Historical Grammar of the East Slavic Languages marks a new approach to the study of this subject, in a number of ways. It is compact, does not repeat the history of East Slavic (in this case, the phonology) as it has been presented before, and is aimed at an audience already familiar with the basics.

The study addresses the phonemic inventories of the East Slavic systems, and introduces the question of functional load in East Slavic in a systematic fashion. Another approach taken is an areal one: how and where do various key vocalic and consonantal features occur across the geo-linguistic continuum? The study of East Slavic is also not undertaken in isolation, but includes Polish in reference to some crucial phonological features – a language that is connected to the western reaches of East Slavic geographically as well as linguistically. Finally, the study is broadened to include what many are now accepting as a fourth East Slavic language: Rusyn.

Stefan M. Pugh is Reader in Russian at the University of St Andrews (Scotland). He has published widely on East Slavic languages and linguistics, including Testament to Ruthenian: a Linguistic Analysis of the Smotryc'kyj Variant (1996), Ukrainian: A Comprehensive Grammar, with J. Ian Press (1999), and Systems in Contact, System in Motion: the Assimilation of Russian Verbs in the Baltic Finnic Languages of Russia.

Table of Contents:

Abbreviations
Notes on Transliteration

Chapter One: Preliminaries and History
1.0 Introduction
1.1 Major Historical Events in the Linguistic History of East Slavic
1.2 Written Languages and the Codification of the East Slavic Literary Languages
1.3 The History of the East Slavic Literary Languages: a Schematic Overview

Chapter Two: The Vowels
2.0 The (Proto-) Indo-European Sources of the Common Slavic Vocalic System
2.1 The Vowel System of Common Slavic and the Emergence of East Slavic
2.2 From Common East Slavic to the Modern Languages: Systemic Equilibrium?
2.3 An Areal Description of Key Vocalic Features of East Slavic

Chapter Three: The Consonants
3.0 The Consonants of Common Slavic: Indo-European Origins
3.1 Stops, Spirants, and Sonants
3.2 Simplification, Merger, and Expansion: from Indo-European to Common Slavic
3.3 The Emergence of the East Slavic System
3.4 An Areal Description of Key Consonantal Features of East Slavic

Chapter Four: Conclusions
4.0 Preliminaries
4.1 The Vowel and Consonant Systems
4.2 Functional Load
4.3 The Place of Polish
4.4 A Final Word on the Phonological Continuum
4.5 Future Volumes: Morphology

Selected Bibliography

ISBN 9783895860133 (Hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 27. 135pp. 2007.

Czech in Generative Grammar

Mojmír Dočekal, Petr Karlik, Jana Zmrzlíková (eds.)

This book is the first to analyse the Czech language within a generative framework. In twelve studies, this work offers an analysis of the Czech language, which possesses a rich morphological system and a relatively free word order. It suggests new hypotheses and modifications of existing influential hypotheses based on Czech data.

The book addresses classic phenomena which have been central to generative grammar for all of its existence, such as reflexive verb forms, infinitives, wh-questions, mixed categories, and others. It also touches on problems whose descriptive analysis are connected with Prague School structuralism and only later have received generativists' attention, e.g. topicalisation and theme/rheme word order.

Contents:

Petr Biskup:
Sentence-final sentence adverbs in the phase model

Pavel Caha:
A Note about A Note About Nothing

Markéta Ceplová:
Infinitives under 'have'/'be' in Czech

Mojmír Dočekal:
Only, bound variables and VP ellipsis in Czech

Jakub Dotlačil:
Clitic omission in Czech as across-the-Board extraction

Joseph Emonds:
Czech Cases and the Syntacticon: Poznámky k, o, okolo, nad nĕčím a pro nĕkoho Petr Karlík: Mixed Nominals in Czech

Lucie Medová & Tarald Taraldsen:
1, 2, se

Radek Šimík:
The Czech invariant demonstrative to is a Foc head

Hana Skrabalova:
Wh-questions with conjoined wh-words

Andrea Volencová:
Reflexive verbal forms in Czech from the Romance perspective

Markéta Ziková:
Why Czech case markers sometimes get lost

ISBN 9783895860799 (Hardcover). LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 28. 208pp. 2007.

The Origins of Slavonic

Noel C. Brackney
University of Surrey

This book examines the causes of the dissolution of Common Slavonic. Archaeologists have questioned traditional theories of the Indo-Europeanization of Europe; consensus has been growing that the Indo-European languages arrived in Europe earlier than previously thought, accompanying the introduction of agriculture at the end of the Neolithic period. This stands in contrast to the premise that Proto-Indo-European was introduced during the Bronze Age by steppe nomads.

Acceptance of the former model requires adjustment in the chronology of the break-up of Indo-European unity. It also necessitates the modification of theories of language change. This issue has been addressed by the proposal of a framework of language evolution incorporating the Utterance-Based Theory of Selection and the Punctuated Equilibrium Model. Both stress the role of external factors in the development of languages.

The conclusion is that there exists a concrete and dynamic relationship between catastrophic historical events and episodes of profound change in the structure of a language. The body of this book is composed of historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence, which substantiates this claim.

Noel C. Brackney currently lectures in Russian at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom and is a member of the Surrey Morphology Group. This monograph is based on his doctoral dissertation.

Table of Contents

Foreword iii

Abbreviations iv

Illustrations vi

Acknowledgements viii

Chapter 1:
Introduction 1

Chapter 2:
Theoretical Parameters 6
2.1 Introductory Remarks 6
2.2 From Early Philological to Neogrammarian Theories of Language Change 8
2.3 The Neogrammarian Approach to Language Change 11
2.4 Structural and Generative Linguistics 12
2.5 The Object of Study 18
2.6 Definition of Terms 20
2.7 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language Change 23
2.8 Language Change 25
2.9 The Ontogeny of Linguistic Change 28
2.10 The Function of Linguistic Change 30
2.11 The Mechanisms and Phylogeny of Linguistic Change 30
2.12 Phonological Mechanisms 30
2.13 Morphological Mechanisms 31
2.14 Syntactic Mechanisms 33
2.15 Towards a Phylogeny of Change 34
2.16 Macromechanical and Micromechanical Linguistic Change 35
2.17 Lack of Concrete Divisions with the Hierarchy and Mechanisms of Change 36
2.18 The Actuation of Change 37
2.19 ‘Critical Mass’ and the Punctuated Equilibrium Model 41
2.20 Linguistic Contact 47
2.21 The Role of Context in Linguistic Change 49
2.22 Summary 49

Chapter 3:
History 51
3.1 Introduction 51
3.2 Environmental Factors 56
3.3 The Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age 59
3.4 The Middle Bronze Age, the Late Bronze Age, and the Classical Period 62
3.5 The Cimmerians 67
3.6 The Scythians 68
3.7 The Greek Colonies 70
3.8 The Sarmatians 71
3.9 The Early Slavs: Some Preliminary Remarks 71
3.10 The Early Slavs: Review of Primary Sources 72
3.11 The Early Slavs: Archaeological Evidence 75
3.12 Review of Traditional Assessments of IE Expansion and Consolidation 81
3.13 The Demic Diffusion Model 85
3.14 The Pre-Proto-Indo-Europeans, Proto-Indo-Europeans, and Slavs 91
3.15 Summary 98

Chapter 4:
Language 100
4.1 Introductory Remarks 100
4.2 10, 000 Years BP: Pre-Proto-Indo-European 102
4.3 The Grammatical Structures of Pre-Proto-Indo- European 109
4.4 6th Millennium BCE-5th Millennium BCE: From Pre- Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Indo-European 115
4.5 The Significance of the PPIE-PIE Typological Shift 117
4.6 Transitional (Early Proto-Indo-European) Phonetics and Phonology 117
4.7 Transitional Morphology 121
4.8 Transitional Lexicon 122
4.9 5th Millennium BCE-3rd Millennium BCE: Proto-Indo- European 123
4.10 Proto-Indo-European Morphology 126
4.11 3000-2000 BCE: Balto-Slavonic 129
4.12 Balto-Slavonic Phonetics and Phonology 131
4.12 Balto-Slavonic Morphology and Syntax 132
4.13 2000 BCE-1000 CE: Proto-Slavonic and Common Slavonic 134
4.15 Proto-Slavonic Phonology 136
4.16 Syllabic Synharmonism and Rising Sonority 138
4.17 Common Slavonic Phonology 144
4.18 LCS Dialect Areas 147
4.19 Elimination of Diphthongs in Liquid Sonorants 147
4.20 Development of Palatalized Dental Stops 149
4.21 The Evolution of the Jers 150
4.22 Proto- and Common Slavonic Morphology and Syntax 150
4.23 Lexical Borrowings into Proto- and Common Slavonic 153
4.24 Summary 156

Chapter 5:
Conclusion 158

Bibliography 162

Index 176

ISBN 9783895860713 (Hardcover). LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 29. 193pp. 2007.