Journal of Slavic Linguistics

Ludmila Veselovská. Wh-questions: A case study in Czech. Olomouc: Palacký University, 2021. 283 pp. ISBN 978-80-244-5965-3 (print), ISBN 978-80-244-5966-0 (online: PDF).

Julia Bacskai-Atkari — 2024-12-25

The volume, written by Ludmila Veselovská, takes a look at the syntax of wh-questions, with a particular focus on Czech. The author adopts a generative approach and aims at reconsidering the previous approaches to wh-fronting in the literature in the light of the Czech data, as contrasted especially with English.

Jasmina Milićević. Serbian Clitics. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2023. 166 pp. [Studies in Language Companion Series (SLSC), 229.]

Zrinka Kolaković — 2024-12-25

Serbian Clitics presents a comprehensive and theoretically based formalized description of second-position clitics (henceforth 2P CLs) in standard Serbian. This monograph from the John Benjamins publishing house consists of seven chapters that previously appeared as individual papers in scholarly journals and edited volumes (Milićević 1999, 2005, 2007, 2009a–b, 2014, 2019a–b).

Janina Mołczanow. Interactions of vowel quality and prosody in East Slavic. Sheffield, UK: Equinox Publishing Ltd, 2022. 216 pp. [Series: Advances in Optimality Theory.] ISBN-13 (Hardback) 9781800502345, ISBN (eBook) 9781800502352.

Darya Kavitskaya — 2024-12-25

Janina Mołczanow’s book Interactions of vowel quality and prosody in East Slavic develops an account of vowel reduction in East Slavic languages, such as standard Belarusian and standard Russian, as well as many dialects that exhibit many different patterns of vowel reduction. Vowel reduction in East Slavic is extremely complex. Traditionally one distinguishes moderate reduction, which applies in the syllable immediately preceding the stressed one (called “first pretonic” or just “pretonic” in the Slavic literature), and extreme reduction, which applies to vowels in other unstressed syllables in a word. While Mołczanow adopts an existing account of extreme reduction, she proposes a novel treatment of moderate reduction. The claim of the book is that all the different patterns of moderate vowel reduction attested in East Slavic can be unified because all vowel alternations that are the result of this type of reduction are due to the presence of High tone in the head foot.

Modeling gender variation in Russian indeclinable nouns

Varvara Magomedova — 2024-12-25

In this paper, we provide an analysis of the grammatical gender of 131 inanimate indeclinable Russian nouns based on the data from the General Internet Corpus of the Russian Language. We demonstrate that most nouns show substantial variation, being used in two or even in all three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. We identify several factors affecting this, primarily the gender of the semantic analogy noun and the root-final vowel. We argue that these data can be used to compare several major morphological frameworks and conclude that some approaches, namely optimality-theoretic probabilistic ones, are better suited to account for them. We also compare different models within the chosen set of approaches and show that the hierarchical Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) models are superior to the classical MaxEnt models.

OV/VO word order in heritage Russian: Is Transfer at Play?

Maria Martynova — 2024-12-25

The present study investigates the choice of OV/VO word order in heritage and monolingual Russian. In monolingual Russian, OV/VO order is claimed to be sensitive to the object realization (noun vs. pronoun) and clause type (main vs. embedded). In heritage Russian, OV/VO order is claimed to be prone to changes under language contact. Analyzing spoken and written narratives produced by heritage speakers (HSs) of Russian residing in the US and Germany, we scrutinize HSs’ choice of OV/VO orders in comparison to the monolingual speakers from Russia. According to the results of the binomial generalized linear mixed-effects model, the OV/VO choice in heritage Russian was best predicted by the clause type and object realization. Specifically, the likelihood of producing the OV order was lower in the embedded clauses than in the main clauses among all speaker groups. Furthermore, all three speaker groups preferred the OV order with the pronominal object, while the preference shifted towards the VO order when the object was realized by a noun. Finally, both HS groups behaved similarly to the monolingual speakers in their choice of OV/VO orders. The results of the study do not provide any clear evidence for cross-linguistic influence from the majority languages and suggest that the word order choice of heritage and monolingual speakers depends on multiple factors, such as clause type and object realization.

The Slavic clausative-presentative construction

Igor Mel'čuk — 2024-12-25

The paper describes the clausative-presentative construction [Claus-PresC], a particular type of the presentative construction found in Slavic languages, using data from Russian and Serbian. The Claus-PresC is headed by a special presentative lexeme that is a clausative (i.e., can constitute a clause by itself or together with its obligatory actant): Rus. ÈTO / Serb. TO ‘that.situation.is [Y]’ and Rus. VOT / Serb. EVO ‘I.indicate.here [Y]’. Such a lexeme takes as its actant, the presentee, a fully independent clause (i.e., a clause without a complementizer), which is, typologically speaking, a rare occurrence.

We show that the semantic and syntactic properties of the Claus-PresC follow directly from the lexical meanings of the clausative-presentative lexemes that head it, with a conclusion that the Claus-PresC is a syntactic construction only in a very general and vague sense of the term (‘a configuration of syntactically linked items’) that applies to any syntactic phrase. The Claus-PresC—a clausative with its actant—is contrasted with the cleft construction, with which is it sometimes equated in the literature, the latter being a genuine syntactic construction.

The discussion is carried out within the dependency-based, synthesis-oriented framework of the Meaning-Text linguistic theory.

Disassembling and Reassembling Pronouns

Zorica Puškar-Gallien — 2024-12-25

This paper explores the building blocks of personal pronouns in order to provide a unified model of the form, locus and function of phi- and case features of pronouns that will account for their morphological distinctions and agreement properties. The proposal bears on the notion of hierarchy within the syntactic projections in the nominal domain, such that the base (nP) is dominated by phi-features (in the order: Person > Number > Gender), which are in turn dominated by case. The structure of pronouns proposed in this paper is shown to have consequences for pronominal morphology: 3rd-person pronouns resemble nouns in that both consist of an nP base, dominated by number-, gender- and case-bearing functional heads. First- and second-person pronouns on the other hand, are also based on an nP, but instead of grammatical gender, they encode person above the nP. Both types of pronouns differ from nouns in lacking a lexical root (Moskal 2015b; Smith et al. 2018). The proposal for their morphological realisation will account for various types of suppletion found in their paradigms and offer an argument in favour of dynamic determination of cyclic domains.