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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.
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.
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)
a- vs. B-languages or 2nd position vs. verb-adjacent clitics in west andsouth slavic languages?
(2008)
Empty categories, null-subjects and null-objects and how to treat them in the minimalist program
(1995)
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.
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.
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.