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Theoretical and experimental aspects of syntax-discourse interface in heritage grammars
In 'Theoretical and Experimental Aspects of Syntax-Discourse Interface in Heritage Grammars', Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan investigates comprehension and production of anaphoric dependencies with null and overt subject pronouns. She discusses the divergent behaviour of the heritage speakers of Russian by providing a closer look at their proficiency level, quantity of input and order of language acquisition. She explains the results with various degrees of successful application of pragmatic principles and efficiency in allocating cognitive resources.0The contribution of the monograph lies in the discussion of theoretical and experimental issues related to anaphora resolution along with an investigation of all aspects of representation and processing of anaphoric pronouns by various kinds of bilinguals: heritage speakers, L2 learners and L1 attriters.
Book
The Syntax of Russian
The study of Russian is of great importance to syntactic theory, due in particular to its unusual case system and its complex word order patterns. This book provides an essential guide to Russian syntax and examines the major syntactic structures of the language. It begins with an overview of verbal and nominal constituents, followed by major clause types, including null-copular and impersonal sentences, WH-questions and their distribution, and relative and subordinate clauses. The syntax behind the rich Russian morphological case system is then described in detail, with focus on both the fairly standard instances of Nominative, Accusative and Dative case as well as the important language-specific uses of the Genitive and Instrumental cases. The book goes on to analyze the syntax of 'free' word order for which Russian is famous. It will be of interest to researchers and students of syntactic theory, of Slavic linguistics and of language typology.
eBook
Russian Case Morphology and the Syntactic Categories
In this book, David Pesetsky argues that the peculiarities of Russian nominal phrases provide significant clues concerning the syntactic side of morphological case. Pesetsky argues against the traditional view that case categories such as nominative or genitive have a special status in the grammar of human languages. Supporting his argument with a detailed analysis of a complex array of morpho-syntactic phenomena in the Russian noun phrase (with brief excursions to other languages), he proposes instead that the case categories are just part-of-speech features copied as morphology from head to dependent as syntactic structure is built.Pesetsky presents a careful investigation of one of the thorniest topics in Russian grammar, the morpho-syntax of noun phrases with numerals (including those traditionally called the paucals). He argues that these bewilderingly complex facts can be explained if case categories are viewed simply as parts of speech, assigned as morphology. Pesetsky's analysis is notable for offering a new theoretical perspective on some of the most puzzling areas of Russian grammar, a highly original account of nominal case that significantly affects our understanding of an important property of language.
eBook
Theoretical and Experimental Aspects of Syntax-Discourse Interface in Heritage Grammars
InTheoretical and Experimental Aspects of Syntax-Discourse Interface in Heritage Grammars,Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan investigates comprehension and production of anaphoric dependencies in heritage Russian. She explains the representational and processing mechanisms behind the divergent behaviour of the experimental group.
eBook
Old Russian Possessive Constructions
This book is a detailed study of the possessive semantic space within the framework of construction grammar. Using corpus data from Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian, the book uses semantic maps to document the relationship between form and meaning in a set of semantically closely related syntactic constructions that can all express adnominal possession and all partially overlap. The book also traces the development of these constructions from the earliest Slavic attestations towards Modern Russian, thus also using the semantic maps as a diachronic tool.
This approach results in a much improved analysis of the data at hand: The competing possessive constructions are treated as partly synonymous constructions in the same semantic space. Changes are then seen to follow paths in this space. The constructionist perspective also allows discerning the relative contributions of the possessor nominal, the possessee nominal and properties of the constructions themselves.
The book is a contribution to Slavic historical linguistics, to the general understanding of adnominal possession and to forwarding functionalist approaches to syntactic change.
eBook
Symmetry breaking in syntax and the lexicon
This book is a research monograph that explores the implications of the strongest minimalist thesis from an antisymmetric perspective. Three empirical domains are investigated: nominal root compounds in German and English, nominal gerunds in English and their German counterparts, and small clauses in Russian and English. A point of symmetry that has the potential of stalling the derivation emerges in the derivation of all of these constructions. Building on certain assumptions on how Merge works, this book shows that the points of symmetry can all be resolved in the same way; despite the fact that the three empirical domains under investigation are standardly derived from distinct structural configurations, such as head-head merger in the case of root compounds, head-phrase merger as it arises from standard complementation/predication structures for nominal gerunds, and phrase-phrase merger in small clauses. This book is of interest to all researchers working on syntax and its interfaces.
eBook
Categorial selection and functional structure in the noun phrase: revisiting Russian small nominals
Given the well-attested selectional asymmetries between clauses and nominals, selection-based empirical arguments for the projection of functional structure in the noun phrase are especially pertinent for the debate regarding the syntax of nominal phrases. One such argument is the selection of ‘small nominals’ by a Russian aspectual prefix. This paper reports naturally occurring and experimental data showing that the Russian cumulative aspectual prefix
na-
is equally compatible with nominals with and without adnominal modifiers and therefore does not c-select a ‘small nominal’, contrary to all existing claims in the literature. Russian ‘small nominals’ thus provide no evidence for the selection of functional structure in the noun phrase and the observed restrictions follow from the semantics of the prefix and how it interacts with the semantics of the event description.
Journal Article
On the status of NCIs: An experimental investigation on so-called Strict NC languages
This paper investigates the status of Negative Concord Items (NCIs) in three so-called Strict Negative Concord (NC) languages (namely, Greek, Romanian, and Russian). An experimental study was designed to gather evidence concerning the speakers’ acceptability and interpretation of sequences with argumental NCIs in subject, object, and both positions when dhen/nu/ne were not present. Our results show that NCIs are negative indefinites whose presence in a clausal domain is enough to assign a single negation reading to the whole sequence, thus arguing in support of the hypothesis that in NC structures the minimal semantic requirement to convey single negation is that one or more NCIs encoding a negative feature appear within a sentential domain. We argue that in these structures dhen/nu/ne are the instantiations of a negative feature [neg] disembodied from an indefinite negative NCI in order to obey a syntax–phonology interface constraint.
Journal Article
LEXICAL AND SYNTACTIC CONGRUENCY IN L2 PREDICTIVE GENDER PROCESSING
This article investigates how lexical and syntactic differences in L1 and L2 grammatical gender affect L2 predictive gender processing. In a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, 24 L1 Russian adult learners and 15 native speakers of German were tested. Both Russian and German have three gender classes. Yet, they differ in lexical congruency, that is, whether a noun (“house”) is assigned to the same or a different gender class. Further, gender is syntactically realized on postnominal suffixes in Russian but on prenominal articles in German. For adjectives, both Russian and German mark gender on suffixes. In predictive gender processing, we find interactions of proficiency and congruency for gender-marked articles. Advanced L2 learners show nativelike gender prediction throughout. High-intermediate learners display asymmetries according to syntactic and lexical congruency. Predictive gender processing obtains for all nouns in the (syntactically congruent) adjective condition, yet only for lexically congruent nouns in the (syntactically incongruent) article condition.
Journal Article
The syntax and semantics of Swedish copular sentences
This paper investigates the (recent) case alternation in Swedish equative and predicational copular sentences (‘Cicero is Tully’, ‘Cicero is a nice guy’). A central contribution of the paper is showing that this alternation is an LF-phenomenon, contra Sigurðsson (in: Hartmann, Molnárfi (eds) Comparative studies in Germanic syntax: from Afrikaans to Zurich German. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 2006) who conjectures that Swedish is changing in the direction of English and Danish, where all postcopular DPs receive Accusative case, regardless of interpretation. The Swedish alternation is shown to track the same semantic dimension that conditions the choice of predicate case in languages like Polish, Russian and Dutch, namely the distinction between stage and individual level predication. Interestingly, the Swedish alternation is also shown to share distributional properties with the predicate case alternations in these languages. To account for these observations, I propose that the morphological and semantic contrasts between the two alternants are mediated by a structural difference, such that Nominative case involves a biclausal structure, and Accusative a monoclausal structure. This paper further adds to the typological picture, showing that Swedish patterns like Polish, Russian and Dutch, but unlike English and Danish, not just in terms of equative and predicational sentences, but also in specificational copular sentences (‘The fastest runner here is Lisa’). I argue that a particular kind of predicate inversion analysis is required to account for the Swedish type of specification.
Journal Article