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The present article ties in with an earlier study by Chomsky (1970) on nominalizations in English, which was then refined primarily in the influential work of Jane Grimshaw (1990) and is dealt with in detail in Borer (2013) and in Kosta (2020). In contrast to the English gerundives, which do not lose verbal behavior due to the derivation in the syntax and maintain all grammatical categories and characteristics of verbs, which is why one can speak of a real conversion while preserving the verbal semantics, the situation is somewhat different in Czech. In the deverbal, deadjective and other derivations, the Czech apparently made the transition to the noun with its critical properties, which is shown by certain restrictions in the aspectuality marking of deverbal noun phrases on -ni-, -ti-, which, e.g., do not pass the progression durativity test (Vendler 1967). In passive constructions, as is well known, a valence point in the position of the external argument is reduced compared to the corresponding active sentences, while the external argument position in anti-causatives is also not available in the deep structure. In addition to the syntactic restrictions that are evident in nominalizations in the context of simple sentences of different sentence types (causative, anti-causative, passive) and demonstrate the nominal character of certain types of deverbal noun phrases in the first part of this article, the second part of the essay deals with more complex structures and extends its analytical and theoretical part to the phenomenon of nominalizing subordinate clauses. The aim of the central part of this contribution is therefore to test the nominal properties of embedded conjunctional sentences and of embedded headless relative sentences on the basis of empirical data and thus contribute to the knowledge of whether certain types of relative sentences can (or must) be nominalized.
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.
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.
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)
Eliminating empty categories : a radically minimalist view on their ontology and justification
(2013)
This collaborative book has a twofold purpose. On the one hand, the authors present a new framework - Radical Minimalism. The development of such a framework, with a strong basis on mathematics and physics, was born out of the conviction that, if language is really a natural object, there is no a priori reason to study it in isolation from other natural systems. On the other hand, this work represents a significant simplification of the theory of displacement and so-called «empty categories» within the latest development of Chomsky's Strong Minimalist Hypothesis, applying Occam's razor and fulfilling Lakatos' requirements for scientific evolution. Radical Minimalism thus accounts not only for the phenomena orthodox minimalism has explanations for, but also for empirical problems that have not yet been taken into consideration.
Der vorliegende Beitrag setzt sich zum Ziel, zu einem besseren Verständnis pragmatisch relevanter Kategorien beizutragen und dabei die traditionellen Begriffe der klassischen Sprechakttheorie und der sprachphilosophischen Forschung wie Konversationsimplikatur und indirekter Sprechakt erneut auf den Prüfstein der gegenwärtigen konversationsanalytischen Forschung zu stellen (vgl. auch Kostan 1998, 2005, 2009, und Kosta, Thielemann 2009). Im Zusammenhang damit wird auch der Bereich der epistemischen und evidentiellen Modalität diskutiert und am Beispiel des Russischen erläutert.