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The book offers a comprehensive overview of current research in Slavic linguistics from a theoretical and experimental perspective and from a variety of languages. The selected papers from the 11th European Conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages (FDSL 11) that took place at the University of Potsdam in 2015, illustrate the advancement of Slavic linguistic studies and their outreach for the development of general linguistics. The guest paper by Noam Chomsky at the beginning of the book sets a clear sign in this direction and may be taken as an acknowledgement of the field.
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.
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.
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.
Introduction
(2021)
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.
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.
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.
Bilingual Disorder
(2018)
There are few data analysing to what specific extent phonomicrosurgery improves vocal function in patients suffering from Reinke's oedema (RE). The recently introduced parameter vocal extent measure (VEM) seems to be suitable to objectively quantify vocal performance. The purpose of this clinical prospective study was to investigate the outcomes of phonomicrosurgery in 60 RE patients (6 male, 54 female; 56 ± 8 years ([mean ± SD]) by analysing its effect on subjective and objective vocal parameters with particular regard to VEM. Treatment efficacy was evaluated at three months after surgery by comparing pre- and postoperative videolaryngostroboscopy (VLS), auditory-perceptual assessment (RBH-status), voice range profile (VRP), acoustic-aerodynamic analysis and patient's self-assessment using the voice handicap index (VHI-9i). Phonomicrosurgically, all RE were carefully ablated. VLS revealed removal or substantial reduction of oedema with restored periodic vocal fold vibration. All subjective and most objective acoustic and aerodynamic parameters significantly improved. The VEM increased on average from 64 ± 37 to 88 ± 25 (p #x003C; 0.001) and the dysphonia severity index (DSI) from 0.5 ± 3.4 to 2.9 ± 1.9. Both parameters correlated significantly with each other (rs = 0.70). RBH-status revealed less roughness, breathiness and overall grade of hoarseness (2.0 ± 0.7 vs 1.3 ± 0.7). The VHI-9i-score decreased from 18 ± 8 to 12 ± 9 points. The average total vocal range enlarged by 4 ± 7 semitones, and the mean speaking pitch rose by 2 ± 4 semitones. These results confirm that: (1) the use of VEM in RE patients objectifies and quantifies their vocal capacity as documented in the VRP, and (2) phonomicrosurgery is an effective, objectively and subjectively satisfactory therapy to improve voice in RE patients.
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.
The border shifts and population exchanges between Central and East European states agreed at the 1945 Potsdam Conference continue to reverberate in the culture and politics of those countries. Focusing on Poland, this article proposes the term “border trouble” to interpret the politicized split in memory that has run through Polish culture since the end of the Second World War. Border trouble is a form of cultural trauma that transcends binaries of perpetrator/victim and oppressor/oppressed; it is also a tool for analyzing the ways in which spatial imagination, memory, and identity interact in visual and literary narratives. A close analysis of four recent feature films demonstrates the emergence of a visual grammar of cosmopolitan memory and identity in relation to borderland spaces. Wojciech Smarzowski’s Róża (“Rose,” 2011) and Agnieszka Holland’s Pokot (“Spoor,” 2017) are both set in territories that were transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945. Wołyń (“Volhynia,” released internationally as “Hatred,” 2016) and W ciemności (“In Darkness,” 2011), also directed by Smarzowski and Holland respectively, are set in regions that were under Polish administration before the war but were transferred to Soviet Ukraine in 1945. All four productions break new ground in the memorialization of the post-war legacy in Poland. They deconstruct hitherto dominant discourses of simultaneity and ethnic homogeneity, engaging in Poland’s wars of symbols as a third voice: anti-nationalist, but also refusing to essentialize cosmopolitan identity. They show the evolution of border trouble in response to contemporary political and cultural developments.
This introduction to the special section on Poland’s wars of symbols analyzes the symbolic contestation that has characterized the country in recent years, studying a range of phenomena including nation, gender, memory, and religious symbolism within the overall framework of political conflict. In doing so, it offers a multidisciplinary view on political fractures that have resonated throughout Europe and the “West.” Overall, the four case studies in this section study ways in which national symbols, topoi, and narratives have been deployed as tools in drawing and redrawing boundaries within society, polarizing and mobilizing the political camps as well as contesting and resisting power. These studies enable us to situate recent political events in a historical perspective, mapping the rise of populism in Poland against the background of legacies specific to the East-Central European region.
This book features four essays that illuminate the relationship between American and Soviet film cultures in the 20th century.
The first essay emphasizes the structural similarities and dissimilarities of the two cultures. Both wanted to reach the masses. However, the goal in Hollywood was to entertain (and educate a little) and in Moscow to educate (and entertain a little).
Some films in the Soviet Union as well as in the United States were conceived as clear competition to one another – as the second essay demonstrates – and the ideological opponent was not shown from its most advantageous side.
The third essay shows how, in the 1980s, the different film cultures made it difficult for the Soviet director Andrei Konchalovsky to establish himself in the US, but nevertheless allowed him to succeed.
In the 1960s, a genre became popular that tells the story of the Russian Civil War using stylistic features of the Western: The Eastern. Its rise and decline are analyzed in the fourth essay.
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.
This volume provides an overview of current research priorities in the analysis of face-to-face-interaction in Slavic speaking language communities. The core of this volume ranges from discourse analysis in the tradition of interactional linguistics and conversation analysis to newer methods of politeness research. A further field includes empirical and interpretive methods of modern sociolinguistics and statistical analysis of spoken language in casual and institutional talks. Several papers focus on a semantic or syntactic analysis of talk-in-interaction by trying to show how interlocutors use certain lexical, grammatical, syntactic and multimodal or prosodic means for the management of interaction in performing specific actions, genres and displaying negotiations of epistemic, evidential or evaluative stances. The volume is rounded out by contributions to the theory of politeness where strategies of face-work in casual as well as institutional discourse are analyzed, or in which social tasks entertained by code-switching and language alternation within the interaction of bilinguals are discussed.
This book assembles the contributions of the Eighth European Conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages (FDSL VIII) which took place from 2nd to 5th December 2009 at the University Potsdam. The concern was to bring together excellent experienced but also young scholars who work in the field of formal description of Slavic Languages. Besides that, two workshops on typology of Slavic Languages and on the structure of DP/NP in Slavic were organized.
a- vs. B-languages or 2nd position vs. verb-adjacent clitics in west andsouth slavic languages?
(2008)
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).
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.
Formal Slavic Linguistics is concerned with explicit descriptions of structure and meaning of Slavic languages within a certain theoretical framework of Principles and Parameters that attempts to situate linguistic theory in the broader cognitive sciences. Many approaches in the present volume reflect this development in a rather significant way. But the book also illustrates the diversity of approaches we use in attempting to reflect the entire range of subfields within a given theoretical framework of cognitive science. Thus, the authors investigate all linguistic levels and interfaces of a large array of Slavic languages, based on current formal models in linguistics (such as Minimalist Program, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG), Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), The Prague Generative Functional Grammar and Formal Semantics of different origins). Contents: Prosody. Phonetics. Phonology. Morphology. Word Formation. Syntax. Semantics. Lexicon. General Linguistics. Slavic Linguistics. Computational Linguistics. Language Acquisition. Patholinguistics (Disorders of Languages). Psycholinguistics. Parsing. Universal Grammar
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.
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).
Formal Slavic Linguistics is concerned with explicit description of prosody, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, information structure and language acquisition or impairments of language (aphasia) of Slavic languages within a certain theoretical framework of Principles and Parameters (Chomsky 1995 passim). But the two parts also illustrate the diversity of approaches we use in attempting to reflect the entire range of subfields within a given theoretical framework of cognitive science.
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.
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.
Czech library
(2005)
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 list of Polish, Czech, and Russian Nobel laureates for literature, Slavic painters, composers, and directors, the achievements in philosophy, logic, rhetoric, theology, modern linguistics, aesthetics, and literature theory is long. Names such as Comenius, Bolzano, Dvorak, Kandinskii, Wajda, Stanislavskii, Rimskii-Korsakov, Szymborska, Mrozek, Capek, and Havel are known around the world. But who in Germany can truly appreciate their contributions to European culture? Given the centuries of close interaction between German and Slavic cultures in art, literature, business and commerce, political thought, and religion, it is time German institutes of higher learning also overcome the disastrous division of Europe that followed the Second World War. Slavic cultures constitute a part of European culture and learning that is just as important as Western culture. They can no longer be marginalised
Formal Slavic Linguistics investigates all linguistic levels and their interfaces. The contributions of the FDSL VI Conference in Potsdam 2005 are concerned with the explicit description and explanation of prosody, information structure, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, applying recent developments in the Principles and Parameters Framework, OT, HPSG and formal Semantics. The authors analyze also issues in psycholinguistics and computational linguistics.
The Focus Feature Revisited
(2007)
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.