Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (41) (remove)
Language
- English (41) (remove)
Keywords
- Belarus (2)
- 18th century (1)
- Agnieszka Holland (1)
- Anti-Causatives (1)
- Arctic (1)
- Argentina (1)
- Argument-Structure-Ordering Principle (1)
- Buenos Aires (1)
- Causative Alternation (1)
- Duration (1)
Institute
- Institut für Slavistik (41) (remove)
Bilingual Disorder
(2018)
Is translation child's play?
(2021)
1765 and 1767 saw the publication of the German, respectively the English translation of Lomonosov's Kratkij rossijskij letopisec s rodosloviem (1760). For the very first time the European reading public could find out how Russians saw their own history. These translations testified to Russia's ascent both as an empire and as a part of European learned society, and were made by youths who wanted to further their own career and were neither professional translators nor historians. In this article, we argue that the translations of Lomonosov's Kratkij rossijskij letopisec should not be studied as an isolated act of cultural transfer but as an episode in a longer history of circulation of knowledge. We demonstrate the complexity of this circulation by reassessing the 'quality' of these translations and positioning them in that longer history of circulation of knowledge by analysing the distribution of historical concepts (Begriffe) in Lomonosov's original and its translations.
A Conjunction of Mysteries
(2016)
Beyond the Crystal-Image
(2016)
Belarusian protest
(2021)
The Belarusian protest movement that started in August 2020 has been discussed from the point of view of strategy and objectives, and as the cradle of a new subjectivity. This essay goes beyond those two perspectives by looking at the regimes of engagement, developing in interaction with the material and technological environment, that have given the protests their distinctive style. The first part looks at coordination and representation at protest events and in producing protest symbols such as flags. The second part discusses the role of Telegram and the emergence of local protest groups. Even though the movement did not grow organically out of everyday concerns, there are some signs that it has begun to reassemble local communities from above. Yet there are also indications that politics continues to be seen as distinct from everyday life, making it uncertain that the movement will lead to a deeper transformation of society.
This paper intends to explore the interaction between aspect and lexical means, in this case temporal adverbials, in the bounding of representations of situations. First, the theoretical basis is outlined, followed by the results of a corpus analysis of coccurrences with adverbs that limit situations. The term situation encompasses all representable processes, states, events, or actions. Finally, some theoretical conclusions are drawn concerning the cognitive category of bounding, using the example of aspectuality. The imperfective verb forms maintain their aspectuality in delimiting connections with adverbs, resulting in a complex, multi-dimensional aspectuality. In nongrammaticalized forms, such as lexical markers, the speaker is free to make a temporal localization or an aspectual perspective. Lexical expressions can make temporal and aspect markings even more precisely and clearly than tenses. They can also limit or extend situations and thus express aspect. Aspectuality thus presents itself as a compositional category, in which external bounding and the internal representation of a course of action or development can interact.
Yiddish culture developed in Argentina within the context of a self-perception that figured Buenos Aires as a marginal and peripheral locale on the global Yiddish map. Against this backdrop, Argentine Yiddish culturalists argued for the strengthening of local Yiddish culture with a goal of elevating Buenos Aires's status within the international hierarchies of Yiddish culture. Buenos Aires indeed emerged in the 1920s as a producer of Yiddish cultural contents, maintained networks of international cultural contacts with other Yiddish centers, financially supported Eastern European Yiddish establishments, and hoped that these contacts would allow for solving Buenos Aires reputation problems. The pre-World War II preoccupation with the status of Buenos Aires as a center of Yiddish culture provided a basis upon which post-Holocaust discourse of Argentine Jewish responsibility for the maintenance of Yiddish culture was constructed.
When the "Ostjuden" returned
(2021)
This article examines the dynamics that allowed the derogatory term "Ostjuden" to reappear in academic writing in post-Holocaust Germany. This article focuses on the period between 1980's and 2000's, complementing earlier studies that focused on the emergence of the term "Ostjuden" and on the complex representations of Eastern European Jews in Imperial and later Weimar Germany. It shows that, despite its well-evidenced discriminatory history, the term "Ostjuden" re-appeared in the scholarly writing in German and has also found its way into German-speaking public history and journalism. This article calls for applying the adjectival term "osteuropaische Juden" (Eastern European Jews), using a term that neither essentializes Eastern European Jews nor presents them in an oversimplified and uniform manner.
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
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.
The new animacy category in slavic languages : open questions of syntax, semantics and morphology
(2003)
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.
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).
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.
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.