Bøger i Potsdam Linguistic Investigations / Potsdamer Linguistische Untersuchungen / Recherches Linguistiques a Potsdam serien

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 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.

The volume Urban Voices presents studies, which analyse sociolinguistics, grammar and pragmatics of spoken Russian. The contributions investigate how various linguistic, paralinguistic and pragmatic means relate to sociolinguistic dimensions and rely on different quantitative and qualitative methods.

The book presents a Nanosyntactic 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 syntactic parts of diminutives and hypocoristics.

The book presents the analysis of the tripartite deictics, -s, -t and -n, in the Bulgarian Rhodope dialect. The comparison with the temporal values in nominals in other languages explains the relation between the speakers, temporality and consequences on morphosyntax. This research contributes to the theory of the temporal expression in nominals.

This book presents a generative analysis of Czech nominal phrases (with determiners and adjectives). It uses previous studies as well as original paradigms and corpus data. The study analyses the feature content of nouns and their agreements with pronominals, coordinates and quantifiers, arguing that nominal agreement is a superimposed dual system.

This monograph analyzes how gamblers' identities are constructed through discourse by social institutions. Using a variety of data and analytical frameworks, the author offers concrete linguistic evidence on the complementary ontological presence of institutional power holders and the "docile bodies" (Foucault, 1977) for societal functioning.

Subjunctive and indicative interpretations in Serbian are dependent on semantic properties of the matrix verb, the aspect and tense of the embedded verb, and the selection of homophonous da: the indicative or subjunctive da. The choice of mood affects clitic placement, negation interpretation, and licensing of negative polarity items.

The book evaluates Noam Chomsky's contributions to linguistics and focuses on the historic justification for Cartesian Linguistics, the evolution of Chomsky's theorizing, empirical language acquisition work, and computational modeling of language learning. It is shown that calling Chomsky's linguistic Cartesian cannot be historically justified.

This collaborative book both presents a new framework - Radical Minimalism - and 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.

This study analyses the Spanish linguistic means that are used to convey evidential meanings. As evidentiality is - at least in Spanish - a linguistic category that overlaps with other semantic-functional categories, it is argued that the superordinate category speaker's perspectivisation should be used for these categories.

Provides an investigation of single and double cliticization based on research in theoretical syntax and first language acquisition. This book draws crosslinguistic parallels to some of the Romance and Balkan Sprachbund languages.

Presents a novel analysis of Nominal Construction from the syntax-semantics interface. This book is based on the freshly developed framework of Radical Minimalism, and provides both a introduction to this formal model and the application of the theory to real examples provided by native speakers.

From Present to Past and Back

Formalization of Grammar in Slavic Languages

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.

This book discusses the nature of optionality in second language grammars. For these purposes, experimental data from 213 learners of German and 150 learners of Russian across four levels of acquisition has been collected and analysed. The object of inquiry is the acquisition of various impersonal constructions, as well as argument licensing.

This collection of essays wants to draw attention to the tricky interface between multilingualism and translation and discusses the current preliminary findings with a particular focus on Slavonic migrant languages.