Potsdam Linguistic Investigations / Potsdamer Linguistische Untersuchungen / Recherches Linguistiques à Potsdam – serie

This book provides an analysis of binding phenomena in Bulgarian with a strong emphasis on pragmatic issues. In the ‘morphology after syntax’ approach it is assumed that the morphosyntactic objects are spelled out in an increasing order of markedness: the most specific structural description is the first to be spelled out and the least specific one is the last. It is further investigated that the use of overlapping forms in the local domain results from discourse factors.

The Fifth International Workshop on Balto-Slavic Accentology took place in 2009 at the Silesian University in Opava (Czech Republic). This volume contains papers presented at the workshop. The papers treat thematically various aspects of Baltic and Slavic prosodic development as well as provide synchronic descriptions of individual Baltic and Slavic languages and their dialects.

This book provides an in-depth investigation of single and double cliticization based on research in theoretical syntax and first language acquisition. Although the main focus is the analysis of data from Bulgarian, the work draws crosslinguistic parallels to some of the Romance and Balkan Sprachbund languages. Acquisition data from three original experimental studies with 79 typically-developing monolingual Bulgarian children aged between 2 and 4 are reported. This is the first study of the placement properties of object clitics in both pre- and post-verbal positions, and of the acquisition of clitic doubling for Bulgarian. The reported research has direct relevance to the current debate of the crosslinguistic variance in the acquisition of clitics.

This study analyzes the indicative and subjunctive da-complements in the Serbian language while comparing and contrasting them with similar finite constructions in other Slavic and Balkan languages. In complex structures, semantic properties of the matrix verb, homophonous da, and aspectual and tense properties of the embedded verb all contribute to interpretations of the morphologically unmarked subjunctive and indicative moods in the Serbian language. Merging Giannakidou’s theory of mood and veridicality with Progovac’s clausal structure, the author suggests that the choice of the indicative or subjunctive complement determines negation interpretation and implies that clitics in Serbian are not always restricted to the second position.

The volume Urban Voices presents studies, analysing how speakers of Russian convey social meanings across a variety of speech situations. Rooted in quantitative and qualitative methodological frameworks, the contributions show how various linguistic, paralinguistic and pragmatic means relate to sociolinguistic dimensions (e.g. display the social, ethnic, local identity of a speaker, the institutional character of a communicative situation). The analyses are the results of the research network Urban Voices, which focuses on the sociolinguistics, grammar and pragmatics of spoken Russian and investigates its linguistic and communicative diversity. The contributors are Olga Blinova, Nina Bodganova-Beglarian, Beatrix Kreß, Lenore Grenoble, Peter Kosta, Elena Markasova, Ludger Paschen, Nicole Richter, Christian Sappok, Tatiana Sherstinova and Nadine Thielemann.

This book discusses the nature of optionality in second language grammars and the indeterminacy observed in second language users’ linguistic representations. For these purposes, experimental data from 213 learners of German and 150 learners of Russian have been collected and analysed with a special focus on the acquisition of various «subjectless» and impersonal constructions as well as argument licensing. Whereas voice alternations and argument licensing are topics amply discussed in theoretical domains, their practical implementation within second language research has remained a research lacuna. This piece of work intends to fill the gap.

This book presents a morphosyntactic account of vowel length in contemporary Czech. The present approach is strictly decompositional on both the phonological and the morphosyntactic side. It assumes prosodic affixes in contemporary Czech. The focus is on prosodic affixes which realize morphosyntactic parts of diminutives and hypocoristics.

This monograph is a pioneering discourse-oriented study on gambling. Adopting the approach of critical discourse analysis (CDA), it analyzes how gamblers’ identities are constructed through discourse by social institutions. The data consist of newspaper forum letters, gamblers’ monologues released by a state gambling regulatory agency, and materials on problem/pathological gambling published by medical professionals. Incorporating a variety of analytical frameworks from prior researchers into the study, the author offers concrete linguistic evidence on the essential complementary ontological presence of institutional power holders and the «docile bodies» (Foucault, 1977) for societal functioning and the maintenance of social stability.

This book includes twelve articles that present new research on the Finnic and Baltic languages spoken in the southern and eastern part of the Circum-Baltic area. It aims to elaborate on the various contact situations and (dis)similarities between the languages of the area. Taking an areal, comparative, or sociolinguistic perspective, the articles offer new insights into the grammatical, semantic, pragmatic, and textual patterns of different types of predicates or nouns or consider the variation of grammatical categories from a typological perspective. The qualitative analyses find support in quantitative data collected from language corpora or written sources, including those representing the less studied varieties of the area.

This book aims to clarify some puzzles that have been topical in formal linguistics for many decades now. It concerns the status of English and, for comparison, Czech infinitives, as opposed to finite clauses and marginally also gerunds. The book systematically demonstrates the functional (meaning) and syntactic (form) properties of infinitives. It highlights the essential properties common to all infinitives, their core structure in Logical Form (LF) and their relation to an irrealis feature. It also investigates the particularities of the various infinitival constructions.

This book evaluates Noam Chomsky’s contributions to linguistics and focuses on the historical justification for Cartesian Linguistics, the evolution of Chomsky’s theorizing, empirical language acquisition work, and computational modeling of language learning. Chomsky claims that his view is situated within a rationalist Cartesian tradition and that only rationalists can account for all aspects of language. The work challenges both claims. Chomsky projects his own convictions onto Cartesians and his recent work has not lived up to early promises. The Minimalist Program has failed to produce scientific results, and empirical work in developmental psychology and computational modeling further challenge Chomsky’s rationalist dogma.