Journal of Slavic Linguistics

Categorial mismatches of pronouns – a diachronic perspective

2024-08-19T17:01:45+00:00

This paper provides an analysis of mismatched pronominal elements in Slavic, that is cases in which their morphological make-up does not correspond to their syntactic interpretation. It contributes to the existing accounts by showing that the categorial mismatches are a factor triggering pronoun reanalysis in the process of language change. For this reason, this paper argues that the assumption of categorial mismatches is an empirical necessity. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a motivation for the assumption of categorial mismatches of pronouns, which largely stems from Cardinaletti & Starke’s (1999) analysis of structural deficiencies. Section 3 shows the way pronominal mismatches have been accounted for in Slavic, focusing on analyses developed by Despić (2011, 2014), Stegovec (2019), and Puškar-Gallien (2022), which are contrasted with a recent account by Milosavljević (2023), who argues against the assumption of categorial mismatches. Section 4 addresses diachronic data from Old Russian as well as discusses synchronic speaker and dialectal variation in the distribution of pronouns in Polish and Macedonian, arguing that the assumption of pronominal mismatches is a necessity account for the presented empirical facts and to explain the process of language change.

Theme vowels, iterativity and verb classes: A DM analysis

2024-10-01T18:57:39+00:00

This paper is concerned with the relation between theme vowels, mainly -a, iterativity and verb
class properties of Czech predicates. It investigates three phenomena – participial adjectives,
motion verbs and impersonal constructions – and there, two puzzles: unaccusative participial
adjectives with the “transitive” -n/-t suffix and unaccusative impersonal constructions. The
three phenomena share the following properties. They have the iterative (or more generally,
plural) interpretation; display specific changes in the argument structure behavior and crucially,
they contain the verbal theme -a. The article addresses the question of what role the theme -a
has in derivations of these phenomena. It is argued that the theme -a is a marker with several
functions; among other things, it realizes the iterative head. As to the puzzling argument
structure behavior, it is based on the fact that the theme -a can also spell out the agentive and
expletive Voice. Further, it is argued that the suffix -n/-t present in participial adjectives is not
a marker of semantic transitivity; it is only sensitive to morphosyntactic transitivity.

Pseudo-relative clauses and "Pseudo" pseudo-relative clauses

2024-09-23T16:42:59+00:00

Abstract. This paper discusses relative clauses in Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin and Bulgarian, with some comparisons to English and French. It adopts much of the terminology used in the book (Mel'čuk 2021), including governor and image, and discusses differences in relativizer that arise when the governor is a noun vs. when it is certain kinds of non-noun; it connects these differences with different behavior of anaphoric pronouns. The paper nevertheless argues for maintaining the term pseudo-relative in its older meaning (the French type Le voilà qui arrive 'Here he is arriving') rather than Mel'čuk's usage to mean a relative construction that seems to have no expressed governor/antecedent.

UG determinism and phi-feature interpretability in the direction of language change

2024-08-13T17:02:53+00:00

This paper explores the issue of the directionality in language change, analyzing functional elements in Slavic as the empirical basis. Specifically, it examines the diachronic morphophonological weakening of auxiliary verbs and the strengthening of pronominal clitics in Slavic, showing that they instantiate modifications that occurred in opposite directions and which therefore may pose a challenge for the hypothesis of the directionality of language change. The changes are attributed in the paper to a uniform formal condition, the weakening of the T-feature, while their directionality is argued to be contingent on the (un)interpretability of phi-features carried by the elements undergoing the change.

To inflect, or not to inflect, that is the question: an experimental study of indeclinability in Russian

2024-11-14T22:19:44+00:00

Russian indeclinable nouns were analyzed in several studies based on dictionaries and corpora, but, since this group is relatively small and extremely heterogeneous, some questions remained open. This paper addresses them in two experiments in which participants were asked to provide instrumental singular and locative plural forms from nonce nouns ending in -a, -o, -e, -i, -u. Real nouns ending in -i, -u never decline in Russian, those ending in -a almost always decline. All declinable neuter nouns (a large group) end in -o, -e, but recent borrowings are indeclinable. We received many inflected answers for all stimuli, including those ending in -i, -u. This shows that indeclinability is a strongly dispreferred option in Russian. Even more surprisingly, most declinable answers belonged to the I declension, even for -o, -e nonce nouns. Apparently, if a noun ends in a vowel in nominative singular, I declension patterns are more readily generalized to it. We discuss these findings and possible reasons underlying indeclinability and decreasing productivity of the declinable neuter noun group in Russian.

No HAVEs to GIVE? No problem! On the Lack of Asymmetries between Ditransitive 3 Constructions in Slavic Have vs. Be Languages

2024-08-19T16:03:54+00:00

This paper explores a correlation, due to by Harley (2002), that only languages of the world that express predicative possession with a transitive verb akin to English have (i.e., languages with P_HAVE that incorporates into BE in her terms) are languages which allow double object constructions. We sfocus on Polish a language (a HAVE language) and Russian (a BE-language) and show that the distinction between HAVE and BE languages and the availability of P_HAVE does not necessarily affect the properties (or existence) of double object constructions. We next turn to another potential diagnostic for the presence of a PP in a DOC, due to Bondarenko (2018) and involving the availability of restitutive readings in DOCs. We show that Polish and Russian behave alike and both lack restitutive readings in DOCs, which suggests that the presence of a PP/P_HAVE, which Polish has and Russian appears to lack, cannot be the factor responsible for restitutive readings

Case contingency of Macedonian cliticization

2025-08-04T18:27:45+00:00

This paper analyzes patterns of cliticization in Macedonian. Macedonian is one of the two Slavic languages with verb-adjacent cliticization, the other one being Bulgarian. Like Bulgarian, Macedonian requires clitics to adjoin to verbal hosts. However, there are contexts in which the adjunction is not possible. This paper demonstrates that these environments involve hosts that do not have case-assigning properties. Moreover, this paper examines some other properties of Macedonian clitics, showing that in certain contexts they display characteristics of weak pronouns and verbal affixes, unexpectedly resembling certain properties of Polish cliticization.