TY - JOUR A1 - Kosta, Peter T1 - The new animacy category in slavic languages : open questions of syntax, semantics and morphology N2 - The article gives an extensive analyses of the subgender animacy within the whole range of 12 Slavic languages and concentrates then on the new constructions with semantically inanimate nouns that indicate the Gen.-Acc.-case for animates (type Czech Petr si koupil Mercedesa(Gen.-Acc.) instead of Acc Mercedes. "Peter bought a Mercedes". A syntactic and semantic hierarchy of features that determine and drive the selectional properties is considered as well as the morphological (derivational) properties of these nouns. The languages under consideration are: Russian (including Old Russian), Ukrainian, Belorussian; Polish, Czech, Slovak, Lower and Upper Sorbian; Macedonian, Bulgarian, Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian. Y1 - 2003 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kosta, Peter A1 - Schürcks, Lilia T1 - The Focus Feature Revisited N2 - This paper examines some focus constructions in Slavic and argues that prosodic and intonational effects of focus are secondary and derivative of the syntactic and lexical representation. The examples under analysis are taken from Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian and Czech. Y1 - 2007 SN - 978-3-631-55376-3 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kosta, Peter T1 - The fascination of silence or how a child acquires empty categories? : under the comprehension of primary- linguistic data from the corpus "CHILDES" N2 - The article is concerned with the acquisition of empty categories within the Principles-and-Parameters framework (Chomsky 1995; 1998; 2000; 2001ab; 2004). The ealy null subject is one of the most studied topics in the acquisition of syntax. Scholars have taken two basic positions on this phenomenon. One holds that the early null subject reflects an aspect of children's competence. The other tackles the problem by appealing to limitations on children's performance. This article is organized as follows: section 1 presents and evaluates the logical aspect of language acquisition under the P&P approach and gives insights into word order phenomena and the structure of early sentences. Section 2 is concerned with the null subject (pro-drop)-parameter and attributes this phenomenon to an incorrect setting of the parameters governing the lexical expression of subjects across languages. One theory assimilates the early null subject to null subjects in Slavic languages and Italian, and the other assimilates it to null subjects in Chinese Y1 - 2005 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kosta, Peter T1 - Syntax of scilence (VP-ellipsis/gapping and IP-ellipsis/slucing) in Czech and English, or : how to obtain and theoretically describe something that is not visible in the corpus? N2 - Despite the stated primary goal of this article to investigate sluicing, any discussion of the general conditions on ellipsis must begin with the best investigated case, VP ellipsis in Czech and English. I therefore start with these cases, describing the general results and theoretical findings in this area, and then move to a theory of sluicing (IP-ellipsis) in order to discover how these results apply to a more sophisticated theory of focus- and isomorphism-requirements (e.g. Merchand 2001; Tancredi 1992; Rooth (1992). Finally we turn to the most important question of this study: we ask, how these theoretical findings can be applied to corpus data. We assume that both VP-e. and IP-e. are only licensed under the condition of focus feature marking, but not purely as a requirement on isomorphism of two adjunct structures. Y1 - 2004 SN - 80-210-3595-1 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kosta, Peter T1 - Syntactic and semantic characteristics of adverbs and negation in the Slavic languages (with special emphasis on Czech, Russian and South Slavic) : Syntaktische und semantische Besonderheiten von Adverb und Negation im Slavischen :[Beitrag zum XII. Internationalen Slavistenkongress in Ljubljana, 15.-21.08.2003] N2 - This paper follows on from investigations by the author on the status of sentential negation, sentential adverbials and adverbial adjuncts in Czech and Russian (cf. Kosta 1998, 2001, 2003). Based om new theories on Optimality and Minimalism, the attempt is made to examine the syntactic position and semantic characteristics of both types of adverbs (sentential and manner adverbs) on the basis of their relation to sentential negation, and at the same time to deal with such factors as scope, topic-focus-articulation, informational structure etc. The derivation of theoretical premises includes corpus linguistical data. Y1 - 2003 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kosta, Peter A1 - Krivochen, Diego Gabriel T1 - Some thoughts on language diversity, UG and the importance of language typology scrambling and non-monotonic merge of adjuncts and specifiers in Czech and German JF - Zeitschrift für Slawistik N2 - The following article is concerned with the problem of language diversity within the framework of Radical Minimalism (Krivochen 2011, 2012). How can the diversity and variation of languages be explained? For Noam Chomsky, language faculty in the narrow sense (FLN) is nothing but an "organ of the body,' along with other cognitive systems. Our analysis of human language builds on Chomsky's (1995, 2005, 2010) minimalist assumption that the design of language is grounded in conceptual necessity. Adopting this idea, we expect to find three factors that interact to determine (I-) languages attained: genetic endowment (the topic of Universal Grammar), experience, and principles that are language- or even organism-independent." (Chomsky 2005:1). In the present article we provide some ideas about how generative research based on Radical Minimalism can contribute on a par with the typology of languages to a more profound and sound exploration of language variation. The scope of the paper is to compare the distribution of adverbs within the three domains of the clause in Czech and German. The aim of this paper is to show that the feature-based theory of adverb licensing is not able to handle the problem of adverb order variation. Instead, a more parsimonious approach based on the Theory of Radical Minimalism will be chosen. The paper is organized as follows: After some remarks on the role of Universal Grammar, Variation and Typology in section 1, section 2 introduces the theoretical background by introducing the principles and the core of Radical Minimalism, e.g. free unbounded merge, asymmetric c-command and the restrictions within the clause structure composition. In section 3, the distribution of adverbs in the middle field is discussed for Czech and German. In the last part, we introduce the so-called Late Adjunction Hypothesis that results in similar effects to the Early Spell-Out model argued for in our paper. KW - Universal Grammar KW - Variation KW - Scrambling of Adverbial Phrases KW - Strong Minimalist Thesis KW - Radical Minimalism KW - Multiple Spell-Out Y1 - 2012 SN - 0044-3506 VL - 57 IS - 4 SP - 377 EP - 407 PB - De Gruyter CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kosta, Peter T1 - On the Causative/Anti-Causative Alternation as Principle of Affix Ordering in the Light of the Mirror Principle, the Lexical Integrity Principle and the Distributed Morphology JF - Zeitschrift für Slawistik N2 - This contribution is organized as follows: in section 1, I propose a formulation of the Mirror Principle (MP) based on syntactic features; the examples will be taken from Causatives and Anti-Causatives that are derived by affixes (in Russian, Czech, Polish, German, English as compared to Japanese and Chichewa) by head-to-head movement. In section 2, I review some basic facts in support of a syntactic approach to Merge of Causatives and Anti-Causatives, proposing that theta roles are also syntactic Features that merge functional affixes with their stems in a well-defined way. I first try to give some external evidence in showing that Causatives and Anti-Causatives obey a principle of thematic hierarchy early postulated in generative literature by Jackendoff (1972; 43), and later reformulated in terms of argument-structure-ordering principle by Grimshaw (1990:chapter 2). Crucial for my paper is the working hypothesis that every syntactic theory which tries to capture the data not only descriptively but also explanatively should descend from three levels of syntactic representation: a-structure where the relation between predicate and its arguments (and adjuncts) takes place, thematic structure where the theta-roles are assigned to their arguments, and event structure, which decides about the aspectual distribution and division of events. KW - Anti-Causatives KW - Argument-Structure-Ordering Principle KW - Causative Alternation KW - Minimalist program KW - Unaccusatives KW - Thematic Hierarchy KW - Mirror Principle Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/slaw-2015-0038 SN - 0044-3506 VL - 60 IS - 4 SP - 570 EP - 612 PB - De Gruyter CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kosta, Peter T1 - On grammaticalization processes of negated prepositional phrases in slavic languages : negative concord Y1 - 1999 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kosta, Peter T1 - Negation and Adverbs in Czech N2 - Im Artikel wird - im Unterschied zu den Ansätzen in Cinque (1999) und Alexiadou (1997) - nicht von einer festen, universal gültigen Hierarchie von funktionalen Satzprojektionen für Adjunkte verschiedener Klassen ausgegangen, sondern von einer jeweils unterschiedlichen adjungierten Position der Satz- vs. Art und Weise- Adverbien an einen Knoten oberhalb der AgrSP/TP bzw. vP bzw. VP plädiert. Aufgrund des unterschiedlichen Skopusverhaltens der Satznegation bei Satzadverbien (SA) (Neg ist ausserhaln des Skopus von SA) bzw. Art und Weise Adverbien (sie liegen innerhalb des Skopus der Satznegation) wird auch für unterschiedliche basisderivierte Positionen dieser Adjunkte plädiert. Wir geben eine alternative Analyse durch zyklische overte Operation im Rahmen des 'phase-by- phase'-Modells (Chomsky 1999, 2001).Die syntaktische Analyse erfolgt im Rahmen der neueren Entwicklung des Prinzipien-Parameter-Modells und stützt die empirischen Daten auf das tschechische Nationalkorpus (CNK). Y1 - 2003 SN - 3-631-51588- x ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kosta, Peter T1 - Minimalism and free constituent order (in Russian as Compared to German) N2 - The present paper deals with an analysis of Russian as so-called free word order language. The strategies of long scrambling constructions in Russian are compared to the so-called midrange scrambling in German. We consider long scrambling not as A-bar-movement (free adjunction to an XP-category) but as the attraction type of movement of arguments triggered by the Minimal link condition (Chomsky 1995). Free word order languages such as Russian (and to some extent German) have strong D-features on T but weak on V. We consider the approach as presented in Fanselow (1996) as adequate also for our model. Y1 - 2002 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kosta, Peter T1 - How can I lie if I am telling the truth? : the unbearable lightness of being of strong and weak modals, modal adverbs and modal particles in discourse between epistemic modality and evidentiality N2 - How can I lie if I am telling the truth? The unbearable lightness of being of strong and weak modals, modal adverbs and modal particles in discourse between epistemic modality and evidentiality Peter Kosta The major part of my contribution will concentrate on the close relation between epistemic modality and evidentiality and the notions of truth value, indirect speech acts and conversational implicature (cf. Kosta 2005; Kosta 2011b). It is well attested in the literature that the epistemic modal adverb Russian o;evidno, Czech o;ividn;, German offensichtlich, Italian ovviamente can have different interpretation depending on the conversation situation, truth values and scope relations (cf. Kosta 2011a; von Fintel and Gillies 2010; Kratzer 2010). Even a bona fide "epistemicö modal can have two interpretations: a 'strong' interpretation, which - at least with necessity modals - commits the speaker to the truth of the proposition the modal scopes over (von Fintel and Gillies 2010), and a 'weak' interpretation, which is relativized to the content of some source of information that may or may not be faithful to reality. In order to be able to decide whether epistemic particles and modals are strong or weak we have to differentiate between different sources of conversational backgrounds. Following the findings in the research of notional category of modals in Kratzer (2010), the proposed analysis of modals allows for one modal parameter to be fixed by the context of use. It implies that that parameter is responsible for the variety of interpretations modals can receive. Keywords: epistemic modality, evidentiality, strong and weak modals, conversational background In: Thielemann, Nadine and Peter Kosta (eds.), Approaches to Slavic Interaction . 2013. xi, 318 pp. (pp. 167-184) Y1 - 2013 SN - 978-90-272-1037-1 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kosta, Peter T1 - Empty categories, null-subjects and null-objects and how to treat them in the minimalist program N2 - While th LGB literature (Chomsky 1981) contains extensive discussions of empty categories in languages typologically like English on the one hand, and Italian on the other, relatively little has been said about languages like Russian, Polish or Czech in which empty categories are represented in a rather specific way, which fit neither of these types of languages. The main purpose of this paper is to correct this typological imbalance by attempting to demonstrate whether current approaches need to be substantially revised in the light of data from Slavic and certain other languages. The paper proceeds as follows: after making explicit the basic assumptions underlying the several versions of the theory of empty categories, I will argue on the basis of Russian, Polish and Czech null-subjects and null-objects and their distribution that a number of revisions in the theory's rules and basic principles is indeed necessary. Y1 - 1995 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kosta, Peter T1 - Causatives and anti-causatives, unaccusatives and unergatives : or how big is the contribution of the lexicon to syntax? Y1 - 2011 SN - 978-3-631-61869-1 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kosta, Peter T1 - a- vs. B-languages or 2nd position vs. verb-adjacent clitics in west andsouth slavic languages? Y1 - 2008 SN - 978-3-86688-031-3 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kosta, Peter T1 - A cognitive analyses of common nouns : semantics and combinability Y1 - 2005 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kosta, Peter T1 - 70 Years Existence of the Prague Linguistic Circle and 100th Anniversary of Roman Jakobsons Birthday, (Prag, 28. - 30.3.1996). Y1 - 1996 ER -