Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (16)
- Review (3)
- Monograph/Edited Volume (2)
- Doctoral Thesis (1)
- Postprint (1)
Language
- English (23) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (23) (remove)
Keywords
Institute
- Institut für Slavistik (23) (remove)
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.
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.
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.
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 Focus Feature Revisited
(2007)