Synopsis: Advances in formal Slavic linguistics 2021 offers a selection of articles that were prepared on the basis of talks given at the conference Formal Description of Slavic Languages 14 or at the satellite workshop on secondary imperfectives in Slavic, which were held on June 2–5, 2021, at the University of Leipzig. The volume covers all branches of Slavic languages and features synchronic as well as diachronic analyses. It comprises a wide array of topics, such as degree achievements, clitic climbing in Czech and Polish, typology of Slavic l-participles, aspectual markers in Russian and Czech, doubling in South Slavic relative clauses, congruence and case-agreement in close apposition in Russian, cataphora in Slovenian, Russian and Polish participles, prefixation and telicity in Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian adjectives, negative questions in Russian and German and imperfectivity in discourse. The numerous topics addressed demonstrate the importance of Slavic data and the analyses presented in this collection make a significant contribution to Slavic linguistics as well as to linguistics in general.

Synopsis: This collective monograph is the first data-oriented, empirical in-depth study of the system of clitics on Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. It fills the gap between the theoretical and normative literature by including solid data on variation found in dialects and spoken language and obtained from massive Web Corpora and speakers’ acceptability judgements. The authors investigate three primary sources of variation: inventory, placement and morphonological processes. A separate part of the book is dedicated to the phenomenon of clitic climbing, the major challenge for any syntactic theory. The theory of complexity serves as the explanation for the very diverse constraints on clitic climbing established in the empirical studies. It allows to construct a series of hierarchies where the factors relevant for predicting clitic climbing interact with each other. Thus, the study pushes our understanding of clitics away from fine-grained descriptions and syntactic generalisations towards a probabilistic modelling of syntax.

Advances in Formal Slavic Linguistics 2018 offers a selection of articles that were prepared on the basis of talks presented at the conference Formal Description of Slavic Languages (FDSL 13) or at the parallel Workshop on the Semantics of Noun Phrases, which were held on December 5–7, 2018, at the University of Göttingen. The volume covers a wide array of topics, such as situation relativization with adverbial clauses (causation, concession, counterfactuality, condition, and purpose), clause-embedding by means of a correlate, agreeing vs. transitive ‘need’ constructions, clitic doubling, affixation and aspect, evidentiality and mirativity, pragmatics coming with the particle li, uniqueness, definiteness, maximal interpretation (exhaustivity), kinds and subkinds, bare nominals, multiple determination, quantification, demonstratives, possessives, complex measure nouns, and the NP/DP parameter. The set of object languages comprises Russian, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, and Torlak Serbian. The numerous topics addressed demonstrate the importance of Slavic linguistics. The original analyses prove that substantial progress has been made in major fields of research.

Synopsis: The goal of this book is to explore the relationship between the cognitive notion of parthood and various grammatical devices expressing this concept in natural language. The monograph aims to investigate syntactic constructions and lexical categories, e.g., partitives, whole-adjectives, and multipliers, encoding different kinds of part-whole structures both in Slavic and non-Slavic languages. It is envisioned to inspire radical rethinking of the ontology of models accounting for nominal semantics. Specifically, it provides novel evidence for a mereotopological approach to meaning, i.e., a theory of wholes that captures not only parthood but also topological relations holding between parts. This evidence comes from the phenomenon of subatomic quantification, i.e., quantification over parts of referents of concrete count nouns.

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The goal of this collective monograph is to explore the relationship between the cognitive notion of number and various grammatical devices expressing this concept in natural language with a special focus on Slavic. The book aims at investigating different morphosyntactic and semantic categories including plurality and number-marking, individuation and countability, cumulativity, distributivity and collectivity, numerals, numeral modifiers and classifiers, as well as other quantifiers. It gathers 19 contributions tackling the main themes from different theoretical and methodological perspectives in order to contribute to our understanding of cross-linguistic patterns both in Slavic and non-Slavic languages.

Advances in Formal Slavic Linguistics 2017 is a collection of fifteen articles that were prepared on the basis of talks given at the conference Formal Description of Slavic Languages 12.5, which was held on December 7–9, 2017, at the University of Nova Gorica. The volume covers a wide array of topics, such as control verbs, instrumental arguments, and perduratives in Russian, comparatives, negation, n-words, negative polarity items, and complementizer ellipsis in Czech, impersonal se-constructions and complementizer doubling in Slovenian, prosody and the morphology of multi-purpose suffixes in Serbo-Croatian, and indefinite numerals and the binding properties of dative arguments in Polish. Importantly, by exploring these phenomena in individual Slavic languages, the collection of articles in this volume makes a significant contribution to both Slavic linguistics and to linguistics in general.

Empirically, the book covers two areas: the morphosyntax of verbs and categories syncretic with the declarative complementizer in Slavic, together with a comparative look at the similar categories in Latvian (Baltic) and Basaá (Bantu). In the domain of verbs, the book investigates a curious instance of analytic vs. fusional realization of grammatical categories that we find in a semelfactive-iterative alternation in Czech and Polish, where a semelfactive verb stem such as in the Czech kop-n-ou-t ‘give a kick’ alternates with an iterative verb stem as in kop-a-t ‘kick repeatedly’. The iterative -aj stem is morphologi cally less complex than the semelfactive stem formed with the -n-ou sequence, which is paradoxical given an analysis of iteratives as categories whose syn-sem representation is more complex than semelfactives. In the domain of complementizers, the book focuses on cross-categorial paradigms that include an unexpected morphological containment (in Russian), a degree of morphological complexity (in Latvian), and an ABA pattern of syncretic alignment (in Basaá), which we do not expect to find if syncretism is restricted to adjacent cells in a paradigm (cf. Bobaljik 2012).

Analytically, the book focuses on the way the syntactic representations of these categories become realized as morphemes. In the general sense, then, this contribution belongs to a growing body of work that investigates the relation between syntactic structure and morphological form, understood as the amount of morphemes and their placement – in particular the prefix vs. suffix opposition. More specifically, however, the approach to lexicalization taken up in this book is informed by the results of research on syntax in the last quarter of a century, which show that syntactic representations are maximally fine-grained, the picture sometimes described as the “one feature per one syntactic head” dictum. Such a scenario has lead to the situation where syntactic representations can be submorphemic, in the sense that a lexical item corresponds to more than one syntactic head, a strand of research that has become known as Nanosyntax. This book investigates the state-of-art methodology of Nanosyntax in resolving the selected empirical problems in the domain of Slavic verbs and declarative complementizers, the problems that all appear to boil down to the way syntactic representations become realized as morphemes.

Advances in Formal Slavic Linguistics 2016 initiates a new series of collective volumes on formal Slavic linguistics. It presents a selection of high quality papers authored by young and senior linguists from around the world and contains both empirically oriented work, underpinned by up-to-date experimental methods, as well as more theoretically grounded contributions. The volume covers all major linguistic areas, including morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonology, and their mutual interfaces. The particular topics discussed include argument structure, word order, case, agreement, tense, aspect, clausal left periphery, or segmental phonology. The topical breadth and analytical depth of the contributions reflect the vitality of the field of formal Slavic linguistics and prove its relevance to the global linguistic endeavour. Early versions of the papers included in this volume were presented at the conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages 12 or at the satellite Workshop on Formal and Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics, which were held on December 7-10, 2016 in Berlin.