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Preverbal (in)definites in Russian: An experimental study
Daria Seres
2020
This paper presents an experimental investigation aimed at determining the exact<br> nature of the relationship between type of interpretation (definite or indefinite) and<br> linear position (pre- or postverbal) of bare nominal subjects of intransitive predicates in Russian. The results of our experiment confirm that preverbal position<br> correlates with a definite interpretation, and postverbal position with an indefinite<br> interpretation. However, we also discovered that the acceptance rate of preverbal<br> indefinites is reasonably high. We suggest an explanation for the appearance of<br> indefinites in preverbal subject position in terms of lexical accessibility, which is<br> couched in general terms of D-linking.
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Definiteness in the absence of uniqueness: The case of Russian
Daria Seres
2021
This paper is devoted to the study of the interpretation of bare nominals in Russian, revisiting the issues related to their perceived definiteness or indefiniteness. We review the linguistic means of expressing definiteness in Russian, showing that none of them is sufficient to encode this meaning. Taking the uniqueness approach to definiteness as a point of departure, we explore the differences in the interpretation of definite NPs in English and in Russian, arguing that Russian bare nominals do not give rise to the presupposition of uniqueness. The perceived definiteness in Russian is analysed as a pragmatic effect (not as a result of a covert type-shift), which has the following sources: ontological uniqueness, topicality, and familiarity/anaphoricity.
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Prepositional Secondary Predication in Polish: Adjectives in complex constructions *
Małgorzata Szajbel-Keck
2014
Szajbel-Keck, Małgorzata. 2014. Prepositional secondary predication in Polish: Adjectives in complex constructions. In Cassandra Chapman, Olena Kit &amp; Ivona Kučerová (eds.), Annual Workshop on formal approaches to Slavic linguistics: The McMaster Meeting 2013 (Michigan Slavic Materials 60), 361–379. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications.
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Atypical demonstratives in an articleless language
Boban Arsenijevic
The empirical goal of this paper is to present a novel type of atypical use of demonstratives, characteristic for their co-occurrence with items typically used to mark indefiniteness, for their restriction to the weak use (i.e. prosodically deaccented, semantically non-contrastive), and for their particular semantic contribution. At the theoretical level, this paper aims to provide an analysis for the presented facts, and to contribute to answering the semantic question what is the range of referential properties available to the situation pro-noun representing the reference domain restriction in nominal expressions, often referred to as the resource situation (Büring 2004, Cooper 1993, Elbourne 2005, Etxeberria 2005, von Fintel 1994, Kratzer 1989, Percus 2000, Stanley and Szabo 2000, among many others) and to provide arguments for the claim that syntactic structure of nominal expressions in languages without articles do include the DP projection.
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Reference to kinds and subkinds in Polish
Arkadiusz Kwapiszewski
2021
This paper investigates the syntax and semantics of direct kind reference in Polish. Taking Borik & Espinal (2012, 2015) as our point of departure, we argue that kind-referring nominals in Polish have the same properties as their counterparts in English, Spanish, and Russian. Specifically, they are definite and numberless. Even though Polish does not realize definiteness overtly, we present evidence from pronominal co-reference and object topicalization to show that Polish kind nominals are definite. We then point to a previously unaddressed contradiction regarding modified kinds. Borik & Espinal's assumption that bare nouns denote singleton sets of kinds is incompatible with the intersective approach to kind modification (McNally & Boleda 2004, Wągiel 2014). To circumvent this issue, we introduce a subkind operator SK into the semantics, linking it to the projection of a subkind phrase in the syntax. This allows us to account for some novel data involving kind modifiers (e.g. &...
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Definiteness across languages
Maria Teresa Espinal
2019
Weak vs. strong definite articles: Meaning and form across languages Florian Schwarz 2 Definiteness in Cuevas Mixtec Carlos Cisneros 3 Strong vs. weak definites: Evidence from Lithuanian adjectives Milena Šereikaitė 4 On (in)definite expressions in American Sign Language Ava Irani 5 A nascent definiteness marker in Yokot'an Maya Maurice Pico 6 Definiteness across languages and in L2 acquisition Bert Le Bruyn 7 Licensing D in classifier languages and "numeral blocking" David Hall 8 On kinds and anaphoricity in languages without definite articles Miloje Despić
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Numberless kinds: Evidence from Russian
Olga Borik
Catalan Journal of Linguistics
As is well-known from both descriptive and formally oriented literature, kind referring nominal phrases in Russian can appear in both morphologically singular and plural forms (Chierchia 1998; Doron 2003; Dayal 2004). The main contribution of this article is to argue that morphologically singular kind expressions are, in fact, numberless nominal phrases. In other words, we will argue that the best way to analyse these expressions, which we refer to as definite kinds, following the terminology of Borik & Espinal (2012, 2015), is by representing them as lacking both syntactic and semantic Number. We base our analysis on the theoretical postulate that, semantically, Number can be viewed as a Realization Operator converting properties of kinds into properties of objects, and that definite kinds do not activate such an operator whatsoever. We show how the analysis we propose for definite kinds can be extended to explain the peculiarities of the word order found in modified kind expressions in Russian.
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Issues in the Syntax of Nominals
Marija Runic
2014
This dissertation explores several aspects of nominal syntax of Resian, an underdescribed highly endagered Slovenian dialect spoken in the Northeast of Italy. From a descriptive point of view, this thesis aims at providing an empirical base related to the syntax of Resian nominals by implementing most recent advances in the formal study of nominal expressions. From a theoretical point of view, its goal is to contribute to the ongoing debate on the presence of the DP layer in articleless Slavic languages. The claim is that Resian has developed the definite article, though visible only in certain syntactic enviroments. As a consequence, null Ds are possible if certain structural conditions are satisfied. Chapter 1 offers an overview of socio(linguistic) situation of Resian, some of the properties of Resian grammar ascribed to the contact with Romance, and methodology implemented in the thesis. Chapter 2 contains theoretical framework of the dissertation, including the debate on the pr...
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The Fleeting DP in Bulgarian and Macedonian: The View From Left-Branch Extraction
Jelena Stojkovic
Structure Removal, ed. by Andrew Murphy, Linguistische Arbeits Berichte, Universität Leipzig, 2019
This paper is concerned with restrictions on Left-Branch Extraction (LBE) in Bulgarian and Macedonian, the only two Slavic languages with articles. The data indicate that the availability of LBE is related to the number of modiers, and thus require a revision of the generalisation that all languages with articles disallow LBE. Following Martinović (2019), Calabrese & Pescarini (2014), a solution based on the order of operations is proposed, connecting the availability of LBE to the idea that projections can be removed via syntactic operations such as Exfoliation (Pesetsky 2019). The application of Exfoliation depends on the relative timing of article placement, which in turn is performed via a (revised) post-syntactic operation of Generalised Lowering (Embick & Noyer 2001). Exfoliation and subsequently LBE are fed by an early application of Lowering, assumed to be able to interleave narrow syntax (Martinović 2019), but if applied late, Lowering counter-feeds these two operations.
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DP and mandatory determiners in article-less Serbo-Croatian
Branimir Stanković
Acta Linguistica Academica, 2017
Although it lacks grammaticalized categories of definite and indefinite articles and its "bare" nouns are (usually) ambiguous between a definite and indefinite interpretation, Serbo-Croatian has appropriate lexical items for marking discourse-old and discourse-new nominal referents. I demonstrate that there are contexts in which use of these discourse markers is obligatory for obtaining the intended reading, as the "bare" nominal phrase would unambiguously be interpreted as definite or indefinite, depending on the context. More importantly, when present, these discourse markers block left branch and adjunct extractions from the rest of the NP, indicating that a determiner phrase might be projected, even in an article less language.
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