Topics in the History of Russian

Ian Press
University of St Andrews

'Topics in the History of Russian' emerges from an attempt to write short answers to university examination questions on the history of the Russian language. It has built up from that to become as up-to- date and comprehensive as achievable, but remains essentially a brief presentation of information on about forty broad and less broad topics in the general, phonological, morphological, and dialectal history of the Russian language.

These are rounded off by appendices on the sounds of Russian, on the forms of Russian, and on the character and structure of Old Church Slavonic, not to mention a wide-ranging bibliography. The whole complements the author's 'A History of the Russian Language and its Speakers', Lincom 2007.

ISBN 9783895861451. LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 31. 140pp. 2008.

The Phonology of Glides in Russian

Janina Mołczanow
University of Warsaw

This book examines the phonological behaviour of glides in Russian from the perspective of Optimality Theory (OT). The goal of the study is twofold. First, it addresses descriptive issues in the phonology of Russian which have not been discussed in the generative literature to date. Second, the data are analysed in the OT framework. On the one hand, it is argued that OT offers new insights into the phenomena concerning the phonological properties of the Russian v, which derives from the underlying back glide. On the other hand, the investigation of various processes associated with the occurrence of the front glide j reveals that standard OT cannot produce an adequate analysis of a large body of data. The problem stems from the fact that in most cases, the trigger of the process is not present on the surface. As is well known, opaque generalisations cannot be handled within standard OT, which evaluates output forms using one set of ranked constraints. This study argues that a modified version of OT, Derivational Optimality Theory, can successfully analyse the phenomena under consideration.

The first chapter offers an overview of the basic theoretical assumptions and presents descriptive generalisations that are relevant to the ensuing discussion. Chapter two is centred around issues connected with the distribution of high vowels and the corresponding glides in Russian. Specifically, it discovers a generalization that the systematic occurrences of the Cj sequences are conditioned by the presence of an alternating vowel. Chapter three discusses opaque generalisations that result from the interaction of Glide Deletion with other phonological processes, such as Vowel Reduction, Fronting and Retraction. The analysis proposed here strengthens the conclusion from the preceding chapter that OT evaluation must be carried out at different levels. Additionally, this chapter proposes a novel analysis of Vowel Reduction, which assumes that the raising of non-high vowels taking place after palatalised consonants is best analysed as assimilation in height. The final chapter offers an alternative OT analysis of the ambiguous behaviour of the labial continuant v in Russian. It is argued that v is represented as the glide //w// in the underlying representation and that the indeterminate sonorant/obstruent behaviour of v is derived from the interplay of independent constraints.

ISBN 9783895864322. LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 32. 96pp. 2008.

The Syntax of Numerals in Bosnian

Nedžad Leko
University of Sarajevo

This monograph deals with numerals with special emphasis on numerals in Bosnian and their syntactic behaviour. At least eight types of numerals in Bosnian may be singled out, and taking ‘five’ as an example, we have the forms pet, peti, petoro, petori, petorica, petica, petina, po pet representing the various types of numerals. However, syntactically all these numerals behave as three distinct categories, namely as quantifiers, nouns and adjectives.

Chapter 1 is devoted to numerals in general.

Chapter 2 deals with numerals in Bosnian describing them according to the traditional classification of numerals as cardinal, ordinal, collective, etc.

In Chapter 3, the author offers some theoretical considerations about the syntactic behaviour of numerals in Bosnian. Since theoretical considerations are based on real language data, it was inevitable to repeat in Chapter 3 some parts of the discussion from Chapter 2, which is mainly concerned with the description of various types of numerals. Those readers who are mainly interested in theoretical considerations may read first Chapter 3, which also gives some crucial descriptive facts that are extensively dealt with in Chapter 2.

The author has Ph.D. in linguistics (Indiana University, 1986) and teaches linguistics at the University of Sarajevo.

ISBN 9783929075113. LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 33. 111pp. 2009.

Das Serbokroatische zwischen Linguistik und Politik

Mit einer Bibliographie zum postjugoslavischen Sprachenstreit

Bernhard Gröschel

Diese Untersuchung ist die bisher umfangreichste - auch für Nichtslavisten bestimmte - Darstellung der Gesamtproblematik der Sprachenkontroverse nach dem Zerfall Jugoslaviens. Die Kernfrage, ob Kroatisch, Serbisch, Bosn(iak)lsch und Montenegrinisch neuerdings als verschiedene Sprachen oder weiterhin als Varianten bzw. Varietäten einer Sprache zu betrachten sind, wird hier unter Einbeziehung historischer Hintergründe unter kommunikationswissenschaftlichen, linguistischen, soziolinguistischen, sprachpolitischen und sprachenrechtlichen Aspekten analysiert.

Adressaten sind daher außer Slavisten auch Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaftler sowie Politologen und Zeithistoriker mit Interesse an Fragen der Sprach(en)- und Nationalitätenpolitik. Eine Bibliographie (mit über 1500 Einträgen) erfaßt erstmals die weltweit publizierten Monographien, Sammelbände, Aufsätze und Rezensionen zum postjugoslavischen Sprachenstreit.

Inhalt: Vorwort 1. Geschichte des Serbokroatischen und seiner Benennungen bis zum postjugoslavischen Sprachenschisma. 2. Sprachvarianten: Relation zum Systembegriff und Variantentypen. 3. Ausbausprachen und Kulturdialekte. 4. Die Standardsprachenproblematik. 5. Wechselseitige Verständlichkeit von Idiomen. 6. Sezession des Kroatischen. 7. Sprachliche Emanzipationsbestrebungen der bosnischen Muslime. 8. Isolierung des Serbischen. 9. Montenegrinisch: Komponente des Serbischen oder autonome Sprache? 10. Sprache und Sprecher: folk linguistics. 11. Sprache und Recht: Amtssprachen und amtliche Glottonyme. 12. Bestandsaufnahme und Ausblick. Bibliographie und Literaturverzeichnis.

Bernhard Gröschel, geb. am 19.06.1939 in Haida (Nordböhmen). Studium der Slavistik, Allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft sowie Kommunikationsforschung und Phonetik an der Universität Bonn, ebenda 1967 Promotion zum Dr. phil. Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter und Lehrbeauftragter am Sprachwissenschaftlichen Institut sowie am Institut für Kommunikationsforschung der Universität Bonn 1967-1976, 1977-2004 in gleicher Funktion am Institut für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Münster. Publikationen zur Allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft, Kommunikationswissenschaft und Slavistik (Ukrainistik, Russistik, Serbokroatistik).

ISBN 9783929075793. LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 34. 440pp. 2009.

The Tense-Aspect-System of Polish Narrative

A Discourse and Cognitive Approach

David R. Bogdan & William J. Sullivan
Ehime University; Uniwersytet Wrocławski and Uniwersytet im. Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej

This book presents a complete overview of the tense-aspect (T/A) system of Polish and provides the Tense-Aspect-Narrative (TAN) theory to unify all the parts into a systematic whole. It covers the semantics, syntax, and morphology of aspect with special attention to the role T/A forms play in the construction of Polish narrative. The relations between time and tense and between aspect and Aktionsart are considered prior to a complete reanalysis of the tenses and aspects. The tenses are realigned into imperfective and perfective pasts, imperfective and perfective non-pasts, and an imperfective future. A close examination of the morphology of aspect leads to the conclusion that there are three aspects in Polish: perfective and derived vs. unmarked imperfectives. The unmarked imperfectives have morphologically simplex stems without perfectivizing prefixes or imperfectivizing suffixes and communicate Maslov’s general factual meaning. A geometric analogue for the meanings of the three aspects is given and reasons for the widespread but mistaken belief that Polish aspect is binary are examined. Finally, there is an open-ended list of special pragmatic considerations that call for imperfective-perfective juxtapositions.

The book then turns to the heart of the matter: the use of particular T/A forms to signal the contribution each clause makes to an overall narrative. The narrative functions (NF) include PLOT and PRAGMATIC DESCRIPTION (foreground-background) and a third function, TEMPORAL BACKGROUND, for which solid discourse and morphosyntactic evidence is provided. The two narrative times, past and present, are combined with the three NF to produce the TAN hypothesis, which predicts the unmarked T/A choice for the appropriate NF. These are the unmarked T/A-to-NF relations, but they may be overridden by a pragmatically marked form, according to the author’s intent. The system is applied successfully to two written narratives (one past, one present) and to one complex oral narrative with both past- and present-time subtexts. Empirical verification of the TAN hypothesis is provided in the results of two different tests taken by native speakers in Wrocław and Poznań.

The book concludes with some suggestions as to how to apply the TAN system to teaching aspect to students who are not native speakers of any Slavic language.

ISBN 9783929075854. LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 35. 220pp. 2009.

Czech in Formal Grammar

Mojmír Dočekal & Markéta Ziková
Masaryk University

This book is comprised of papers from the conference Czech in Formal Grammar, whose first meeting was held on February 12-14, 2009, at Masaryk University in Brno. The programme of the conference was constituted on the basis of anonymously reviewed abstracts. It consisted of 23 papers and 3 invited talks focused on topics from phonology (Tobias Scheer), syntax (Ludmila Veselovská and Petr Karlík) and semantics (Hana Filip). 18 papers of those presented at the conference appear in their revised and edited versions in this volume.

Every paper in this book presents an original and vital contribution to Slavic linguistics. The material is mainly Czech but a contrastive background, in which Czech is investigated, consists of many Indo-European languages. The fields of research extend from traditional generative grammar domains such as phonology, syntax and semantics to corpus linguistic studies and acquisition of language by children. But there is a common denominator of all the articles presented in the volume and that is respect for formal methods in linguistics. The book is certainly a valuable addition to the bookshelf of everyone interested in Czech, Slavic languages and linguistics generally.

Contents

Zuzanna Bedřichová
Problems and Possibilities of the Annotation of the Interpropositional Discourse Relations in PDT 2.0

Petr Biskup
The Syntactic Structure of PPs

Radek Čech
Testing of the Transitivity Hypothesis: Double Object Verbs and Aspect in Czech

Mojmír Dočekal, Ivona Kučerová
Bound Ability Readings of Imperfective Verbs: A Case for Presupposition

Linda Doleží, Filip Smolík
Direct and Indirect Analysis of Phrasal Comparatives: The Case of Children’s Czech

Joseph Emonds
Czech Gender Realignment: Eliminating Declension Classes and Neuter Gender

Dana Hlaváčková, Klára Osolsobě, Karel Pala, Pavel Šmerk
Relations between Formal and Derivational Morphology in Czech

Andrea Hudousková
Clitic se – Benefit of Being Late

Tomáš Jelínek, Vladimír Petkevič
Automatic Identification of Prepositional and Non-prepositional Cases in Czech

Pavel Kosek
Word Order of the Pronominal Clitics in Non-finite Phrases in the Czech Baroque Language

Jiří Materna Czech
Verbs in FrameNet Semantics

Vladimír Petkevič
Automatic Identification of the 1st and 2nd Person Preterite Active in Contemporary Czech

Tobias Scheer
Representational and Procedural Sandhi Killers: Diagnostics, Distribution, Behaviour

Roman Sukač
Paradigmatic Bridge – Accentual and Quantitative Paradigms of Czech and Slovak Feminine a-stems

Ondřej Šefčík
Preliminary Description of the Czech Phonemic System Using Feature Geometry

Ludmila Veselovská, Petr Karlík
Infinitive Puzzle

Roland Wagner
Situation Control under Reflexivization: A Comparative Study of Certain Verbs in Czech and German

Markéta Ziková
Vowel-zero Alternations in Czech Double Diminutives: From the Havlík Pattern to the Lower Pattern

ISBN 9783895862823 (Hardcover). LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 36. 256pp. 2009.

The Syntax of Noun Phrases in Bosnian and English

Nedžad Leko
University of Sarajewo

This monograph deals with one type of phrasal structures – noun headed structures. They may be extremely complex and frequently differ in complexity from language to language. Therefore, it is useful to contrast noun phrases in two or more languages, here it is Bosnian and English. The aim of the contrastive study is to present both differences and similarities holding between structures of noun phrases in Bosnian and English, not from the point of view of one of them, but from the point of view of how a universal syntactic category, such as the noun phrase, is handled in both of them. In that sense the study has a theoretical, rather than applied, character.

The consideration of contrastive data from two languages (Bosnian being highly inflected in contrast to English) is useful in solving some theoretical problems, specifically those regarding the relations obtaining between modifiers and heads of syntactic categories. The detailed description of the structure of noun phrases in two languages makes it possible to abstract common properties that they share. This in turn contributes to a better understanding of the general properties of the noun phrase in language and its place in Universal Grammar (written in Bosnian). The author has Ph.D. in linguistics (Indiana University, 1986) and teaches linguistics at the University of Sarajevo. (written in Bosnian)

Sintaksa imeničkih sintagmi u bosanskom i engleskom jeziku
Nedžad Leko

Univerzitetu u Sarajevu Ova monografija se bavi sintaksom struktura sa imenicom kao upravnim članom u bosanskom jeziku i odgovarajućim sintagmatskim strukturama u engleskom jeziku. Prvi dio monografije predstavlja skraćenu verziju autorove doktorske disertacije. Teorijski pristup je bio generativni i struktura imeničkih sintagmi se analizirala sa stanovišta Teorije vezivanja i upravljanja koja je podrazumijevala da je imenička sintagma po svojoj sintagmatskoj kategoriji NP. Kasniji razvoj teorije i postuliranje funkcionalnih kategorija je uslovilo da se imeničke sintagme tretiraju kao DP.

U drugom dijelu monografije najprije se u zasebnim poglavljima prezentira tretman sintagmatske strukture generalno u Teoriji principa i parametara, a zatim i u minimalističkom programu. Poglavlja koja slijede su modifikovane verzije autorovih novijih radova. U poglavlju 8 struktura imeničke sintagme se reanalizira kao DP, a poglavlje 9 razmatra mogućnost da su u jezicima bez članova imeničke sintagme ipak NP radije nego DP. Najzad poglavlja 10 i 11 razmatraju posebnu vrstu sintagmi u kojima se uz imenicu pojavljuje neki kvantifikator, ili broj. Autorova disertacija, kao i neki od radova na kojim se zasnivaju poglavlja 8-11, pisani su na engleskom jeziku. Pošto je na bosanskom jeziku objavljeno jako malo radova koji se bave generativnom gramatikom, autor ovom monografijom želi dati doprinos obogaćivanju lingvističke literature na bosanskom jeziku koja tretira sintaksičke fenomene sa teorijskih polazišta generativne gramatike. Autor ima doktorat iz lingvistike (Indiana University, 1986) i sada predaje lingvistiku na Univerzitetu u Sarajevu.

ISBN 9783895864438. LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 37. 202pp. 2010.

Possession in Polish Discourse

Beata Malczewska-Webb
Bond University

Linguistic possession deals with the ways the concept of possession is expressed in a language through syntactic constructions and possessive relationships. This complex phenomenon is difficult to define due to its high variability within particular languages and cross-linguistically. This work examines possession in Polish as a complete system of a single language. First, it aims to study the syntactic structures encoding possession in Polish written discourse in order to examine possessive constructions employed in a variety of contexts. The second aim is to examine the semantic features of the possessive constructions in Polish as they appear in a corpus of actual written language. Several methods have been combined to achieve these aims and Heine’s (1997a) cognitive framework of possessive notions was chosen for examining the semantics of possessive constructions. The first source of data, the book corpus, consists of three types of texts representing contemporary Polish in topical contexts and providing examples of authentic planned discourse. The second source of data is an extensive corpus of Polish available on-line. The quantitative view of possessive constructions demonstrated their high diversity; however, few constructions expressed possession systematically. The findings showed that Polish makes distinctions in the way it encodes possession. The studies of Polish demonstrate how the universal framework (Heine 1997a) works for investigating a specific language. The detailed view of the possessive domain in Polish is a product of a dynamic interrelationship between the syntactic and semantic fields.

Beata Malczewska-Webb works at Bond University, Gold Coast, Australia where she lectures in linguistics and language teacher education (TESOL). She gained her degrees in education and linguistics in Poland and Australia. Apart from the cross-linguistic expression of possession, her other research interests include internationalisation of Australian and global education and teaching in linguistically and culturally diverse groups.

ISBN 9783862884131. LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 38. 228pp. 2013.