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a- vs. B-languages or 2nd position vs. verb-adjacent clitics in west andsouth slavic languages?
(2008)
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.
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.
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)
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 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.
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).