Selected Proceedings of the 14th Meeting of the Slavic Linguistics Society

List of Contributors

Vrinda Subhalaxmi Chidambaram

University of California, Riverside

vrinda@ucr.edu

Steven Franks

Indiana University, Bloomington

franks@iu.edu

Jadranka Gvozdanović

Heidelberg University

Jadranka.Gvozdanovic@slav.uni-heidelberg.de

Iliyana Krapova

Ca’Foscari University of Venice

krapova@unive.it

Alexander Letuchiy

HSE University, Moscow

alexander.letuchiy@gmail.com

Staraya Basmannaya st., 105066

Moscow

Franc Lanko Marušič

University of Nova Gorica

franc.marusic@ung.si

Center za kognitivne znanosti jezika

Univerza v Novi Gorici

Vipavska 13, Rožna Dolina

SI-5000 Nova Gorica

Slovenia

James Joshua Pennington

Concordia College

james.pennington@cord.edu

katrin.schlund@slav.uni-heidelberg.de/schlund@uni-trier.de

Tomislav Sočanac

Ca’Foscari University of Venice

tomislav.socanac@unive.it

Luka Szucsich

Humboldt University Berlin

luka.szucsich@hu-berlin.de

Department of Slavic and Hungarian Studies

Humboldt University

Unter den Linden 6

10099 Berlin

Germany

Alan Timberlake

Columbia University

at2205@columbia.edu

Beata Trawiński

Leibniz Institute for the German Language – Mannheim, Germany

trawinski@ids-mannheim.de

Mladen Uhlik

University of Ljubljana

Fran Ramovš Institute of Slovenian Language

Vladislava Warditz

University of Potsdam

warditz@uni-potsdam.de

Department of Slavic Studies / Slavic Linguistics

wjacek@amu.edu.pl

Faculty of English

Collegium Heliodori Święcicki

Grunwaldzka 6

60-780 Poznań

Poland

Rok Žaucer

University of Nova Gorica

rok.zaucer@ung.si

Center za kognitivne znanosti jezika

Univerza v Novi Gorici

Vipavska 13, Rožna Dolina

SI-5000 Nova Gorica

Slovenia

Andreja Žele

University of Ljubljana

Andreja.Zele@ff.uni-lj.si

Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Ilse Zimmermann†

Leibniz−ZAS Berlin

Karolina Zuchewicz

Humboldt University Berlin and Leibniz ZAS Berlin

karolina.zuchewicz@gmail.com

Department of Slavic and Hungarian Studies

Humboldt University

Unter den Linden 6

10099 Berlin

Germany

Introduction

We are pleased to present this collection of papers on the occasion of the retirement of Professor Peter Kosta, longtime chair of Slavic linguistics at the Department of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Potsdam. The volume offers a selection of papers from the 14th annual meeting of the Slavic Linguistics Society, which was held at the University of Potsdam on 11–13 September 2019. That conference, largely organized by Peter, was intended not only as an event to showcase Slavic linguistic scholarship from around the world, but also as a way to mark Peter’s life-long contribution to our discipline. The papers in these pages are by his friends and colleagues, in honor and recognition of a distinguished career. We wish him success in his transition to retirement, although fully expecting him to continue along the same arc that has defined his interests over the past 40-odd years. These are inspired by but go well beyond purely Slavic topics, and include biolinguistics, generative and comparative syntax, formal semantics, and language typology and universals. The breadth and depth of Peter’s intellectual pursuits can be seen in the titles on the List of Publications that follows this brief introduction, although these do not do complete justice to his relentless energy and unflagging productivity, nor do they recognize his other extensive activities as a teacher and mentor for generations of students, editor of numerous volumes, organizer of diverse meetings, and recipient of prestigious academic awards and honors.

On a more personal note, those of you who know Peter will also know that his verve can border on the frenetic, and that when he sets his mind to something it can border on the fanatical. He brings this special kind of enthusiasm and commitment to all that engages him, both in his professional and his personal life. We have already pointed out his astonishing productivity, varied research interests, and impressive service, but no tribute to Peter Kosta can fail to acknowledge his personal passions. He holds friendship and romance dear, he loves to travel and experience new cultures, and above all he is devoted to rock music. His knowledge in that area is phenomenal, his guitar skills are prodigious, his musical compositions are heartfelt, and his capacity to record songs for streaming until (or sometimes starting at!) the wee hours of the night is overwhelming. How Peter manages to do all this, and also to write and edit so much, remains a mystery even to us, his friends. Of course, he has the unflagging assistance of Monika Kruschinski, to whom we are very grateful for her help in formatting this volume, not to mention the loving support of his wife Erika.

The 15 papers in the volume embrace a range of topics. In the remainder of this introduction we describe the contributions of Vrinda Chidambaram, Steven Franks, Jadranka Gvozdanović, Iliyana Krapova and Tomislav Sočanac, Alexander Letuchiy, Lanko Marušič and Rok Žaucer, Joshua Pennington, Katrin Schlund, Luka Szucsich and Karolina Zuchewicz, Alan Timberlake, Beata Trawiński, Mladen Uhlik and Andreja Žele, Vladislava Warditz, Jacek Witkoś, and the late Ilse Zimmermann. Chidambaram’s paper, “A Case of Parasitic Attrition: The disappearance of the degree morpheme -ьš in Bulgarian and Macedonian superlative adjectives,” examines the historical development of degree adjectives in Bulgarian and Macedonian, which differ from other Slavic languages in forming them only through prefixation to the positive adjective and do not involve suffixation. In it, she identifies the loss of a morpheme in one context due to its disappearance in a different context as “parasitic attrition,” and concludes that, although the comparative degree adjectives lost the degree suffix -ьš via a Jespersen-cyclic change, the loss of the same -ьš degree morpheme in superlatives occurred through the process of parasitic attrition. Franks’s “Reflexive Typology, Movement, and the Structure of NP” is concerned with reflexives in English and Slavic. The properties of these two types of reflexives are very different but are shown to follow from their distinct derivational paths. He argues that the reflexive element is always introduced in a Refl(exive)P, but that the reflexive interpretation is established differently. The English mechanism involves merging a DP with Refl and moving that DP to a higher argument position; this gives rise to reflexivity through coreferring co-arguments and causes an agreeing pronominal element to appear (e.g., himself). In Slavic languages it is instead Refl (e.g., sebja) that moves, thereby establishing a reflexive predicate. The Slavic DP-languages Bulgarian and Macedonian have an extra component, a reflexive clitic (e.g., sebe si), the source of which is explored, with differences between the languages attributed to Macedonian’s lack of the Bulgarian DP-internal Agr(eement)P. The paper ends with a consideration of connectivity effects found in English, in light of the proposed typology. Gvozdanović’s paper, “‘Have’ + infinitive in Czech: a long multilingual history,” treats the contemporary spread of ‘have’ + infinitive across the modal domains in Czech, where the construction is far-reaching. She establishes German equivalents with Czech-specific implementations and then discusses historical attestations of the ‘have’ + infinitive, showing that this construction appears before there was a significant increase in German influence. She argues that it can be ascribed to the Latin model, observing that the first attestations of modal ‘have’ in Old Czech occurred in texts translated from Latin. The paper by Krapova and Sočanac, “Factivity in South Slavic languages: Complement and relative clauses,” focuses on a specific ←14 | 15→type of factive complement clauses and relative clauses in Bulgarian and Croatian. These are clauses headed by deto and što, respectively, which denote specific and presuppositional readings grounded in discourse. They argue that the factive readings associated with such clauses are triggered by these items themselves, which are analyzed as strong presupposition triggers residing in C. The broader implication of the analysis is that factivity is syntactically encoded, and should not be seen as a purely semantic or pragmatic phenomenon. Letuchiy’s contribution, “‘Missed TAM’: The lack of tense and mood marking in Russian argument conditionals – semantic and formal motivation,” discusses Russian sentences with non-verbal predicates which unexpectedly remain unmarked for tense and mood. When conditional esli introduces an argument clause a mismatch in tense-aspect-modality (TAM) marking between main and embedded predicate can arise. The TAM form is normally the same in both clauses, but in this construction the main predicate must be a predicative (rather than a verb) and the present tense is used instead of the expected future or subjunctive. It is argued that the construction results from both semantic and formal factors, and that it is the grammatically “non-standard” head that makes a syntactically non-standard construction possible. The paper concludes with some typological observations. In “Investigation of Slovenian copular agreement” Marušič and Žaucer report their investigation of agreement inside simple predicative sentences. In this type of sentence both noun phrases are nominative, so in principle either could trigger agreement on the copula. They examine various types of copular constructions and show that, regardless of the type of predicative sentence, when a plural is combined with a singular it is always the plural that agrees. Similarly, when a dual is combined with a singular the dual wins out. The novel observation is that when a dual and a plural are combined, the copula can agree with either of the two noun phrases (with a preference for the one following the copula). The relevance of these findings for the recent literature on predication is discussed, and the paper ends by posing several questions for future investigation. Pennington’s contribution to the volume, “Today’s Grammaticalization Theory is Yesterday’s Grammaticalization: the BCMS Future as An(other) Strike Against the Unidirectionality Hypothesis,” concerns the ordering of semantic shift and phonological reduction in the development of the South Slavic future. While advocates of grammaticization contend that semantic shift always precedes phonological reduction, this paper argues that, in the case of BCMS hoću/ću, phonological reduction may have actually preceded the semantic shift. The arguments are based on the negated form neću, which developed out of nehoću, through intermediate stages ne(h)oću and ne(o)ću, with long forms nehoće occurring in folk poetry long after the change via analogical levelling ←15 | 16→with jesam/sam, nijesam. Schlund’s paper, “On the origin of East Slavic Elemental Constructions/Adversity Impersonals. Evidence from town chronicles of the Old Rus’,” addresses the longstanding debate over the origin of so-called Elemental Constructions (ECs, also known as “adversity impersonals”) in East Slavic. While there are no attestations of ECs in Old Church Slavonic, they can be found in medieval chronicles of the Old Rus’. The structure of many of these early supposedly impersonal constructions is however ambiguous between personal and impersonal readings. The paper reviews these early alleged examples of ECs, some of which seem to attest an intermediate stage (with a nominative noun phrase denoting the cause and a non-agreeing neuter predicate). Importantly, they all denote instances of external, physical causation, with other kinds of causation (e.g., emotional causation) missing in both historical and contemporary ECs. In “Incrementality and (non)clausal complementation in Slavic,” Szucsich and Zuchewicz examine the notion of incrementality in Slavic languages, where a common property of all incremental theme predicates is graduality. The assumption that incrementality is a phenomenon involving the partition of events allows them to extend the standard definition of incremental theme verbs taking nominal objects to incremental theme verbs taking clausal complements. Since ‘reveal’-type predicates (e.g., ‘show’, ‘prove’, ‘reveal’) imply a gradual creation of a proof for a ‘that’-clause, they are similar to incremental theme verbs such as ‘build’ or ‘read’. This, they argue, is why perfective ‘reveal’-type predicates induce a veridical interpretation of the embedded proposition. The paper ends with an overview of incremental relations in Finnish and English. Timberlake’s paper, “String Syntax,” puts forward a novel understand of the workings of syntax, demonstrated through diverse properties of Slavic and other languages. It is argued that the driving mechanism of syntax is strings, or forces, that link disparate and discontinuous elements and control the interpretation of constructions. The claim is that syntactic structures cannot be reduced to or derived from a single “Ur-node” that is uniform across languages. There are thus many different types of strings, more than one of which can be attached to a single constituent. Examples of strings considered in the paper include: linearization and information (Russian), individuation and quantification (Estonian), case marking across clause boundaries (Lithuanian), and the nominative object with infinitive in Finnic (and North Russian). Trawiński’s contribution to the volume, “Polish żeby under negation,” discusses two types of complement clauses in Polish introduced by the complementizer żeby: those with obligatory negation in the main clause and those with an obligatory negation in the embedded clause. It is argued that żeby-clauses with an obligatory negation in the matrix clause, licensed by epistemic verbs, can be treated in terms of negative polarity, with ←16 | 17→żeby defined as an n-word (an element that requires a negative context). Structures with żeby-clauses and obligatory negation in the embedded clause, licensed by predicates expressing fear (verba timendi), are argued to be an instance of negative complementation, with żeby specified as a negative complementizer. A uniform lexicalist analysis of these phenomena is proposed within the HPSG framework; it is shown to employ established tools and require no extensions or modifications of that framework. The paper by Uhlik and Žele, “Reflexive Possessive Pronouns in Slovene: A Contrastive Analysis with Russian,” is concerned with the use of the Slovene reflexive possessive pronoun svoj. The properties are contrasted with those of its Russian counterpart. Various syntactic environments are considered, as well as the question of coreference between pronoun and its antecedent. Laying bare the rules governing the use of reflexive possessive pronouns sheds light on the connection between the syntactic contexts they function in and the various meanings expressed. Contrastive analysis reveals contexts in Russian that permit use of nominative svoj, with no overt antecedent; it is also shown that identifying the antecedent of svoj in Slovenian infinitival clauses depends on many factors, most prominent of which are choice of matrix verb and infinitival complement. In “Structural Variation in Heritage Russian Speakers in Germany: Language Usage or Language Change?” Warditz presents ongoing research into transgenerational language changes in Russian heritage speakers living in Germany. Some of the conclusions she draws about the relationship between language usage and language system changes include: (i) certain systemic tendencies can be identified by sampling individual usages from a longitudinal perspective; (ii) these tendencies differ between the first and second generations of heritage speakers; (iii) areas of potential language shift, as well as sensitivity or resistance of certain structures to change, can be identified by documenting the multiformity of contact-affected word-formation; and (iv) word-formation connects morphology, semantics, pragmatics, and lexis, and is a sensitive area in speech in both monolingual and multilingual settings. Witkoś’s paper, “On Some Aspects of Agree, Move and Bind in the Nominal Domain,” extends his previous account of reflexive binding in Polish to cases where a reflexive element is placed in complement position within a nominal projection and its antecedent is placed either within or outside that projection. The account draws from both Agree-based and Move-inspired theories, with the addition of a competition-based element. The paper ends by presenting two kinds of empirical challenge in need of further study. Zimmermann’s contribution, “On Pronouns Relating to Clauses,” deals with Russian anaphoric, cataphoric, interrogative, and relative pronouns relating to root and embedded clauses. The analysis takes into account the semantic flexibility and vagueness of ←17 | 18→constructions with these pronouns and includes parameters in their grammatically determined Semantic Form. These are specified at the level of Conceptual Structure and depend on the context and knowledge of the interlocutors. It is shown why embedded clauses sometimes function as modifiers and sometimes as complements. Also shown is how lexical entries of the anaphor èto, of the cataphoric pronoun to and its zero-correspondent, and of the interrogative and relative pronoun čto play a basic role in the correlation of their phonological, morphosyntactic, and semantic properties.