Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (42)
- Monograph/Edited Volume (8)
- Review (4)
- Postprint (2)
- Conference Proceeding (1)
- Doctoral Thesis (1)
Language
- English (58) (remove)
Keywords
- Anti-Causatives (2)
- Argument-Structure-Ordering Principle (2)
- Belarus (2)
- Causative Alternation (2)
- Duration (2)
- Explanations (2)
- Minimalist program (2)
- Mirror Principle (2)
- Pronouns (2)
- Redundancy (2)
Institute
- Institut für Slavistik (58) (remove)
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.
Efficiency is central to understanding the communicative and cognitive underpinnings of language. However, efficiency management is a complex mechanism in which different efficiency effects-such as articulatory, processing and planning ease, mental accessibility, and informativity, online and offline efficiency effects-conspire to yield the coding of linguistic signs. While we do not yet exactly understand the interactional mechanism of these different effects, we argue that universal attractors are an important component of any dynamic theory of efficiency that would be aimed at predicting efficiency effects across languages. Attractors are defined as universal states around which language evolution revolves. Methodologically, we approach efficiency from a cross-linguistic perspective on the basis of a world-wide sample of 383 languages from 53 families, balancing all six macro-areas (Eurasia, North and South America, Australia, Africa, and Oceania). We explore the grammatical domain of verbal person-number subject indexes. We claim that there is an attractor state in this domain to which languages tend to develop and tend not to leave if they happen to comply with the attractor in their earlier stages of evolution. The attractor is characterized by different lengths for each person and number combination, structured along Zipf's predictions. Moreover, the attractor strongly prefers non-compositional, cumulative coding of person and number. On the basis of these and other properties of the attractor, we conclude that there are two domains in which efficiency pressures are most powerful: strive towards less processing and articulatory effort. The latter, however, is overridden by constant information flow. Strive towards lower lexicon complexity and memory costs are weaker efficiency pressures for this grammatical category due to its order of frequency.
Efficiency is central to understanding the communicative and cognitive underpinnings of language. However, efficiency management is a complex mechanism in which different efficiency effects-such as articulatory, processing and planning ease, mental accessibility, and informativity, online and offline efficiency effects-conspire to yield the coding of linguistic signs. While we do not yet exactly understand the interactional mechanism of these different effects, we argue that universal attractors are an important component of any dynamic theory of efficiency that would be aimed at predicting efficiency effects across languages. Attractors are defined as universal states around which language evolution revolves. Methodologically, we approach efficiency from a cross-linguistic perspective on the basis of a world-wide sample of 383 languages from 53 families, balancing all six macro-areas (Eurasia, North and South America, Australia, Africa, and Oceania). We explore the grammatical domain of verbal person-number subject indexes. We claim that there is an attractor state in this domain to which languages tend to develop and tend not to leave if they happen to comply with the attractor in their earlier stages of evolution. The attractor is characterized by different lengths for each person and number combination, structured along Zipf's predictions. Moreover, the attractor strongly prefers non-compositional, cumulative coding of person and number. On the basis of these and other properties of the attractor, we conclude that there are two domains in which efficiency pressures are most powerful: strive towards less processing and articulatory effort. The latter, however, is overridden by constant information flow. Strive towards lower lexicon complexity and memory costs are weaker efficiency pressures for this grammatical category due to its order of frequency.
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.
The Focus Feature Revisited
(2007)
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
The Author as Researcher
(2019)
This article proposes a new perspective on avant-garde travel writing through the lens of scientific field work, investigating these new writing techniques in Boris Pil’niak’s expedition prose. In the 1920s, the researching writer represents a hidden, but influential counterpart to the widely propagated figure of the working writer. While the author as producer combines word and deed in an operative act, the author as researcher investigates the production of knowledge. This entails revising the centrality of facts. Literature as artistic research subverts factography by going beyond the horizons of veristic data registration to include uncharted realms and vague possibilities. This exploration leads to specific genres: the author as researcher tries his hand at a kind of laboratory text, a prolific genre at the intersection of testing equipment, recording media, and hypothetical thought. Not confined to a sterile lab, avant-garde writer-researchers, as members of research expeditions, oscillate between their home writing desks and the remote depths of the emerging USSR. At the same time, they explore writing practices situated between data acquisition, sampling, fact-finding, observation and recording.
Tarkovsky’s legacy
(2016)
This chapter provides a description of generative syntax as a discipline within Slavic linguistic research from a theoretical, methodological and scientific-historical viewpoint, including those descriptive models and theoretical approaches which are also preferred in Slavic generative linguistics working within the Principles and Parameters framework (Chomsky 1995 pasim). A general comprehensive description of generative syntax, syntactic levels ad methods of description is followed by a short overview of the current state of the art and the goals and targets of syntactic theory and the description of some syntactically relevant categories (such as negation, word order and clitics). In chapter 2, I will introduce some basic notions of the Minimalist framework. I will concentrate on the question how syntactic levels have to be represented in the Minimalist program (2.1), how the structure of sentential negation can be motivated by the raising of the finite verb (2.2), how negation syntactically interacts with pronominal and verbal clitics (2.3) and related phenomena such as Prosodic Inversion (PrI) (2.4), and finally, what the driving force for V- raising and negation in Imperatives, Gerunds and Infinitives is (2.5).
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.
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.
Peter Huckauf
(2014)
Die Gedichte und Texte Peter Huckaufs in dem vorliegenden Band 11 der „Potsdamer Beiträge zur Sorabistik” sind eine Hommage an die Lausitz, an ihre Menschen und Landschaften. In Wortspielen, visueller Poesie und Prosatexten samt Fotographien und Einblicken in seine Lebensgeschichte stellt sich der Autor als Liebhaber dieses Landstrichs vor. Er lässt den Leser teilhaben an einer Entdeckungsreise durch die verloren gegangene Heimat der Kindheit, die er sich als Rückkehrer neu erschließt. Seine Reminiszenzen sind nachhaltig sowohl für den deutschen als auch sorbischen/wendischen Rezipienten, was Peter Huckauf zu einem für die Lausitz und darüber hinaus interessanten Schriftsteller und Künstler macht. Den sprachlichen Aspekt beachtend, wurden ausgewählte Gedichte der Sammlung in die obersorbische und vor allem in die niedersorbische Sprache übertragen.
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.