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The product of a group of scholars who have been working on new directions in Historical Linguistics, this book is focused on questions of grammatical change, and the central issue of grammaticalization in Indo-European languages. Several studies examine particular problems in specific languages, but often with implications for the IE phylum as a whole. Given the historical scope of the data (over a period of four millennia) long range grammatical changes such as the development of gender differences, strategies of definiteness, the prepositional phrase, or of the syntax of the verbal diathesis and aspect, are also treated. The shifting relevance of morphology to syntax, and syntax to morphology, a central motif of this research, has provoked lively debate in the discipline of Historical Linguistics.
This book is the first attempt to provide a unified account of the "be-"possessive syntax and its extension to the modal and the perfect constructions in Russian/North Russian within a generative framework. Apparently diverse constructions are construed as deriving from the "have/be" parameter, which depends on the utilization of the prepositional complementizer with a Case feature. The "be"-perfect structure provides an adequate environment where ergativity is encoded via verbal nominalization. The relevance of the "be"-perfect structure for a split ergative pattern shows that the ergative system is a syntactically conditioned phenomenon rather than a purely morphological diversity. This volume also offers the diachronic study of the "be"-syntax, investigating the evolution of the "be"-perfect and "be"-modal constructions, which has rarely been explored within a formal framework. Concrete scenarios are proposed for the developmental paths of the "be"-perfect and the "be"-modal constructions, based on textual evidence in old North Russian.
The present volume offers a selection of papers on current issues in Slavic languages. It takes stock of the past 20 years of linguistic research at the Department of Slavic Studies at Leipzig University. Within these two decades, the scientific writing, teaching, and organization done in this Department strengthened the mode of research in formal description of Slavic languages, formed another center for this kind of linguistic research in the world, and brought about a remarkable amount of scientific output. The authors of this volume are former or present members of the Department of Slavic studies or academic friends. Based on the data from East, West, and South Slavic languages, the papers tackle issues of all grammatical subdisciplines in current models of description, compare parts of the grammars of Slavic languages, explain categories and phrases in Slavic languages that do not exist in present-day Indogermanic languages of Western Europe, and propose ways how to update the standard of lexicography in still less described Slavic languages. A study of language competence is dedicated to the actual requests on heritage speakers and shows how their abilities can be evaluated.
Advances in Formal Slavic Linguistics 2022 brings together a collection of 22 articles originating as talks presented at the 15th Formal Description of Slavic Languages conference (FDSL 15) held in Berlin on 5–7 October, 2022. The contributions cover a broad spectrum of topics, including clitics, nominalizations, l-participles, the dual, verbal prefixes, assibilation, verbal and adjectival morphology, lexical stress, vowel reduction, focus particles, aspect, multiple wh-fronting, definiteness, polar questions, negation words, and argument structure in such languages as BCMS, Bulgarian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Russian, Slovenian, Ukrainian, and Upper Sorbian. The wide range of topics explored in this volume underscores the diversity and complexity of Slavic languages. The contributions not only advance our understanding of languages belonging to the Slavic group but also offer fresh perspectives for linguistics more broadly.
Too often today it seems we find ourselves communicating from radically different perspectives on the world and we often despair of communication even being possible. Peter Ludlow argues that perspectival content, or what some call indexical content, is ineliminable and ubiquitous, running through our accounts of human action and emotions, perception, normative behaviour, and even our theories of computation and information. While such content may be ineliminable, it also gives rise to philosophical puzzles - particularly those involving reporting these contents from different perspectival positions. Such puzzles have led some to try and abandon perspectival content, and others to despair of communication across diverse perspectival positions. Ludlow argues that communication across diverse perspectival positions is not only possible, but routine, and develops a theory of interperspectival content and cognitive dynamics to explain how it is accomplished.
Coordination in syntax is an important part of the analysis of sentence structure. Niina Ning Zhang addresses the issues raised by coordinate pairings and the implications of these structures, looking in particular at examples within English and Chinese. The volume covers the major questions regarding coordinates in syntax, providing a fresh perspective to arguments raised within previous literature. She explains how such coordinate complexes are structured, how some coordinators can be combined in parts of speech, the fixed nature of some of these pairings and what changes exist between the coordinate and non-coordinate constructions. The theories raised are backed up by a rich variety of examples as well as providing a cross-linguistic perspective, contextualising these ideas within current syntactic research.
" ... Articles that have appeared in English and American newspapers, also in 'Red Star' ... [and] a few letters ... received ..."--Page v.