Jacek Witkos - Böcker

This book discusses existential and possessive constructions in two important, yet under-studied, language families, Slavic and Finno-Ugric. Using data from the Slavic languages of Polish, Belarusian and Russian, and the Finno-Ugric languages of Finnish, Hungarian, Meadow Mari, Komi-Permiyak and Udmurt, as well as the closely related Selkup of the Samoyedic family, the chapters in this volume analyse predicative possession in current syntactic terms. Seeking an answer to the theoretical question of whether BE-possessives and HAVE-possessives are just accidental values of the 'Possessive Parameter' or are intrinsically related, this book takes a comparative approach to a whole range of syntactic and semantic phenomena that appear in these constructions, including the definiteness restriction, genitive of negation, person/number agreement, argument structure and extractability. The individual case studies can be easily integrated into the Principles & Parameters framework in terms of parametric variation. Approaches to Predicative Possession is an important contribution to our understanding of predicative possession across languages, with findings that can be fruitfully extended to other language families. It is an equally useful source of information for theoretical linguists, typologists, and graduate students of linguistics.

This book discusses existential and possessive constructions in two important, yet under-studied, language families, Slavic and Finno-Ugric. Using data from the Slavic languages of Polish, Belarusian and Russian, and the Finno-Ugric languages of Finnish, Hungarian, Meadow Mari, Komi-Permiyak and Udmurt, as well as the closely related Selkup of the Samoyedic family, the chapters in this volume analyse predicative possession in current syntactic terms. Seeking an answer to the theoretical question of whether BE-possessives and HAVE-possessives are just accidental values of the 'Possessive Parameter' or are intrinsically related, this book takes a comparative approach to a whole range of syntactic and semantic phenomena that appear in these constructions, including the definiteness restriction, genitive of negation, person/number agreement, argument structure and extractability. The individual case studies can be easily integrated into the Principles & Parameters framework in terms of parametric variation. Approaches to Predicative Possession is an important contribution to our understanding of predicative possession across languages, with findings that can be fruitfully extended to other language families. It is an equally useful source of information for theoretical linguists, typologists, and graduate students of linguistics.

Expressing negation is a universal property of all human languages. There is considerable variation, however, in the exact ways negation materializes cross-linguistically. Strict Negative Concord differs both from the Negative Polarity Item strategy and the Asymmetric Negative Concord strategy in that the sentence becomes negative only if the sentence negator is overtly expressed in it, irrespective of how many negative expressions are used. The central aim of this book is to describe Strict Negative Concord in some Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages. In particular, the volume gives an insight into the forms Strict Negative Concord manifests itself in Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovenian (Slavic), Finnish, Hungarian, Mari (Finno-Ugric) and the closely related Selkup (Samoyedic) to a wide linguistic community. It aims to create a platform for comparison with similar phenomena in well-described European languages.

This book is a collection of papers on various aspects of the syntax and morphosyntax of Germanic and Slavic languages (English, German, Czech, Polish, and Russian), stemming from the Syntax Session of the 2006 PLM conference in Poznań (Poland). Gisbert Fanselow and Caroline Féry discuss lack of Superiority with German movement; Gereon Müller links pro-drop to non-impoverished inflectional morphology; Christopher Wilder deals with English constructions with a directional locative and imperative; Adam Biały decomposes event structure; Katarzyna Sówka analyses the semantics of German verbs of giving; Ewa Bułat takes a fresh look at null subjects; Helen Trugman presents the distribution of adnominal adjectives in Russian; Agnieszka Pysz explores the same issue in Old English; Bożena Cetnarowska employs OT to describe possessives in Polish; Katarzyna Miechowicz-Mathiasen and Paweł Scheffler compare Polish and Italian reversible verbs; Radek Šimik describes different relative pronouns in Czech; Mojmir Dočekal discusses lack of WCO effects in Czech; Michael Moss argues for a complex structure of the Polish clause, and Jacek Witkoś demonstrates that control-as-movement penetrates CPs.

This volume presents a number of contributions to the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Slavic Linguistics Society held in Szczecin, Poland, October 26–28. The largest number of articles address issues related to the (morpho)syntactic level of language structure, and several papers describe results of recent research into different aspects of Slavic linguistics as well. The current volume proves conclusively that Slavic linguists make a remarkable contribution to the development of various theoretical frameworks by analysing linguistic evidence from richly inflected languages, which allows them to test and modify contemporary theories and approaches based on other types of data.

Numeral constructions in Polish are known for their complex morpho-syntax: in particular, depending on the type, case and syntactic context, the numeral may show properties of the adjective or the noun. This volume presents a comprehensive analysis of these constructions set in the current generative-minimalist model of grammar, with elements of nano-syntax. The authors pay particular attention to a feature-based derivation of the numeral construction in its different versions, including complex multiplicative numerals, as well as its distribution in the clause. Numerals in the subject position, with their peculiar case and agreement features become a focal point of attention. Their properties receive a principled account through the use of the case projection sequence and disciplined movements within it.

One of the well-known properties of Slavic languages is that they show subject-oriented reflexives. This book presents this phenomenon in Polish in great empirical detail and provides its up-to-date syntactic analysis, couched in the minimalist model of grammar. The analysis accounts for the fact that not only nominative subjects but also experiencers, both dative-marked and some accusative-marked, function as antecedents for reflexive elements. On the basis of empirical studies, the book explains why dative experiencers bind both reflexive and pronominal possessives in identical local configurations, while nominatve subjects bind only reflexive possessives. The authors investigate both long-distance binding relations in infinitives and contexts internal to nominal phrases. Extensive references are made to binding in other languages and alternative models.