Journal of Slavic Linguistics

Mirative and reflective Wh+li in South Slavic

2022-01-28T03:43:10+00:00

This paper presents a South Slavic construction, descriptively labelled Wh+li, which uses morphological elements of polar (li) and content (Wh) questions.It manifests different readings in different languages, which I identify as a mirative and a reflective reading. Capitalizing on the evidence for (South Slavic) li as a focus particle, I develop a focus-based syntax-semantic account for each reading: the mirative one as a 'low' li and the reflective one as a 'high' li. I explore the implications of Wh+li for the broader cross-linguistic landscape beyond Slavic, and how this phenomenon can inform the nature of the relation of mirativity and reflectivity to evidentiality.

Word order and prosody effects in perception of sentence focus in Russian by native speakers and adult L2 learners

2022-01-28T22:27:02+00:00

This study compares Russian native speakers and adult L2 learners on their ability to locate new information and contrastive foci in SVO and OVS sentences during silent reading and listening comprehension. Participants completed a reading task and a listening task identifying the focused word using context and prosodic cues. L1 English L2 Russian speakers performed accurately in reading, but in listening half of the items contained a mismatch between focus and nuclear pitch prominence. Participants consistently identified prosodically accented words in contrastive focus, but showed greater variability with new information focus in sentence-final position. This may reflect differences between pitch accents marking contrastive vs. new information foci, compounded by the prosody–focus mismatch in half of the auditory stimuli.

Two BAP violations in Russian verbal stress

2022-01-28T03:44:38+00:00

The Basic Accentuation Principle of Russian (Kiparsky & Halle 1977), associating main stress with the leftmost accent, appears to be violated with two pre-accenting morphemes: the infinitive and the passive past participle (PPP) suffixes: stress is final instead of pre-suffixal. I will first demonstrate that the PPP suffix is unaccentable, and then show that this violation is resolved if the notion of an unaccentable morpheme is also extended to roots.

Beyond the suffix: Examining Imperfectivization strategies in L2 and Heritage BCMS in Italy

2024-01-17T12:35:30+00:00

The present study focuses on heritage speakers of BCMS in Italy and L2 learners of BCMS with Italian as their L1. We discuss the role of context in the use of imperfective forms in heritage speakers of BCMS in Italy and L2 speakers of BCMS with Italian as their L1. Focusing on the difference between simplex/perfective/biaspectual and secondary/derived imperfectives formed with a -va- morpheme, our study has the primary goal of highlighting possible differences between the two groups of speakers, compared to a control group of monolingual speakers; additionally, we aim at showing possible effects of the Italian imperfect -va- morpheme on the distribution of the homophonous imperfective -va- morpheme in BCMS, in the progressive and habitual contexts.

Listener-Driven Sound Change in Exemplar Theory

2025-01-10T13:26:07+00:00

This paper presents a formal model to derive both gradient and categorical behaviors in listener-driven sound change. As a case study, I model the development of opposing acoustic trajectories of high vowels before labials in SE Bulgarian, where *i > u, and Polabian, where *u > i. By encoding different listener expectations into my model of labial co-articulation, I am able to derive both change, like SE Bulgarian and Polabian, and stability. In order to simulate the observed behaviors, I embed a Harmonic Grammar (Flemming 2001, Katz 2010, Burns 2021) in an Exemplar Theory (Pierrehumbert 2001) framework. My model suggests that while systems where interlocutors are aligned in their exceptions can result in sub-phonemic innovation, systems where they are misaligned result in both sub-phonemic innovation and eventual re-categorization in the preexisting phoneme inventory.

Masculine animate as a subgender of masculine in Polish: evidence from psycholinguistics

2023-08-24T23:40:44+00:00

This paper investigates grammatical gender and animacy distinctions in Polish. Differences in agreement morphology between masculine animate nouns and masculine inanimate nouns have long motivated debates regarding the number of gender categories in Polish. The present paper contributes to this discussion from the perspective of psycholinguistics. Evidence from native Polish speakers’ gaze patterns collected during an eyetracking study using the Visual World Paradigm suggests that, during real-time language processing, when speakers hear an adjective suffixed with the masculine animate accusative morpheme -ego, this activates a masculine gender feature and an independent animacy feature. This constitutes evidence in support of treating gender and animacy as independent noun categorization systems in Polish.

There is more about existentials

2024-07-28T07:14:12+00:00

This paper examines the properties of existential constructions in Serbian and Lithuanian. Existential constructions share some interpretive properties with locative constructions, in that both express a proposition about the existence or the presence of someone or something in a context. However, Serbian and Lithuanian existentials display a cluster of properties that set them apart from locatives: unmarked verb-subject order (with pivot following copula), lack of agreement between copula and post-copular pivot, genitive case on the pivot and a dedicated form of the copula. The case properties of the pivot in existentials depend on specific interpretive properties related to agentivity, volitionality and definiteness and there are structural distinctions between existential and locatives, which are captured in syntax with parallel Agree operations: in locatives, the copula agrees with the pivot; in existentials, it agrees with an expletive pro.

Coordinated wh-questions

2025-08-14T07:28:26+00:00

Bošković (2022) challenges the claim from Citko & Gračanin-Yuksek (2013) that mono-clausal Coordinated Wh-Questions (mCWHs) and multiple wh-questions without coordination are derived through the same mechanism: multiple wh-fronting. This claim predicts that the two constructions behave the same with respect to superiority, which Bošković calls into question. We show that the analysis of Coordinated Wh-Questions in Citko & Gračanin-Yuksek (2013) does derive the parallelism between the two constructions with respect to superiority with one additional assumption: that the sidewards movement of wh-phrases happens late in the derivation. This assumption also derives the sensitivity of mCWHs to islands. We also present some empirical challenges for Bošković’s analysis.

Negation in Czech polar questions

2024-05-31T10:04:05+00:00

The meaning of negation in polar questions has been investigated primarily based on data coming from English. This paper focuses on the syntax-semantics interface of negation and selected particles in Czech polar questions. We explore the interpretation of negation depending on its syntactic position as well as its relation to question bias. Our analysis of the so-called outer negation relies on Repp’s 2013 operator FALSUM. We report on data from a naturalness judgment task where it is shown that (i) FALSUM is preferred in interrogative polar questions, (ii) declarative word order is preferred in evidentially biased contexts, (iii) FALSUM is compatible with any type of evidential bias (positive, negative, neutral), (iv) the particle náhodou is licensed by FALSUM, and (v) the particle copak is sensitive to contextual evidence.

On licensing NCIs in Russian

2025-05-08T09:32:20+00:00

In Russian, negative concord items are not licensed when they are complements of adjectives found in post-nominal position with respect to the noun they modify. Here I argue that such complex APs are relative clauses when licensing takes place. The licensing of negative concord items thus fails because it involves cross-clausal licensing, which is generally banned in Russian. When such complex APs are in pre-nominal position their structure is not sentential; therefore licensing of negative concord items is successful.

On the structure of double-coordinator constructions

2023-09-28T11:12:06+00:00

The paper presents novel Macedonian and Slovenian data with conjunction doubling that exhibit unexpected binding behaviour as each individual conjunct binds an anaphor in the object position individually. The paper shows the extent of the phenomena in Macedonian and Slovenian and discusses several possible analyses. The paper argues these data also cannot be simply explained away and proposes a silent quantifier in the structure of coordination, which further means the surprising binding is really just an instance of variable binding.

Microvariation in the Slavic secondary imperfective

2024-08-21T09:01:37+00:00

While secondary imperfectivization (SI) is a prominent phenomenon in Slavic, there is variation in its realization. This study contributes novel cross-Slavic data systematizing our understanding of the distribution and meaning of SI morphology in Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Slovene, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish. In two exploratory quantitative studies, we (1) show that SI is more productive in Rus, Ukr, Mac, and Bul than in Pol, Cze, Ser, and Slo, and (2) explore semantic conditioning of the variation in productivity of SIs of empty prefixed verbs (they get habitual meaning in Mac and Bul and both single ongoing and habitual readings in Rus and Ukr). We postulate two types of SI morphemes – SI (equally productive across Slavic) and SI-hab (productive only in Bul and Mac). At the formal level, we posit an agreement operation involving a parasitic habitual feature with different behaviors in the tested languages.

Russian E-verbs and thematic vowel change

2025-08-22T08:24:07+00:00

This paper argues for an ablaut process (thematic vowel raising) targeting the thematic vowel e of second-conjugation verbs in the present tense, as well as in several other environments. I will argue that thematic vowel raising is obligatory in the present tense and in the past passive participle and conditioned by the verbal root in actor nominalization and in the secondary imperfective. I will also show how this process provides for a better understanding of some exceptional second-conjugation verbs, as well as transitive softening verbs, and offer a reanalysis of some other cases with an unexpected thematic vowel change.

Expletive Negation revisited

2023-07-31T11:00:32+00:00

Standard approaches classify questions with preposed negation in Russian as a species of Expletive Negation, alleged to be devoid of polarity reversing semantics despite the compulsory morphosyntactic exponence of negation (i.e., ne ‘neg’) realized on the verb. This purported semantic vacuity led to the conclusion that negation is neutralized or erased in Expletive Negation contexts, which amounts to equating the meaning of certain varieties of negative YN questions to the meaning of “the corresponding affirmative question[s]”. I argue against this approach. My analysis provisions two possible merge sites for negation in Russian – above AspectP/vP and above TP. Lower negation, built atop Aspect/v, delineates the exclusive domain of negative concord. Higher negation is introduced in the illocutionary field and serves to modify speaker commitments. NegYNs are ambiguous between these two structures.

Same or different? Infinitival and subjunctive complementation vs. verb serialization in Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian

2024-07-19T18:57:33+00:00

The paper deals with a heretofore understudied multi-verb construction in BCMS, which consists of two verbs inflected for imperative. The construction in question is shown to share the bulk of the properties found in serial verb constructions (SVC) across languages, such as mono-clausal syntax or single-event semantic readings. We thus argue that BCMS constructions of this type should be included within the broader SVC typology, which was not recognized in the previous literature. BCMS SVCs are subsequently compared to other similar constructions found in this language, such as control subjunctives or infinitives. The paper ends with a formal analysis that accounts for both the shared properties and the contrasts that these constructions exhibit.

Object drop in imperatives and the status of imperative subjects

2025-05-08T10:55:28+00:00

The paper examines object drop in imperatives and argues that the null object in question undergoes movement to the left periphery. The paper also examines the position of overt imperative subjects, and argues that in some, but not all languages overt imperative subjects undergo movement to the left periphery, where the crosslinguistic variation in question correlates with the precise verbal form used in imperatives, the relevant difference being true imperatives vs other/bare forms used as imperatives (the latter leads to movement of overt imperative subjects to the left periphery).