Bøger i Potsdam Linguistic Investigations 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 presents fifteen papers from diverse areas of Slavic linguistics, including syntax and semantics, both synchronic and diachronic.

The book offers five studies tackling the issue(s) of explanation and prediction in linguistics from different perspectives. The studies were conducted by internationally renowned experts in generative linguistics, biolinguistics, language philosophy, and functional linguistics.

Selected papers from Formal Description of Slavic Languages (FDSL 11), syntax, semantics, morphology, phonetics, phonology, experimental work, Slavic languages, Slavic linguistics, guest paper Noam Chomsky.

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.

Este libro ofrece una revisión crítica del concepto de complejidad lingüística desde sus primeros desarrollos en el siglo XVIII hasta el presente. Con este propósito, se aborda el estudio de los antecedentes de la idea contemporánea de lengua compleja, para después compararlos con las propiedades que se atribuyen en la actualidad a una mayor presencia de complejidad lingüística. Asimismo, se clasifican las aportaciones recientes según el enfoque adoptado: algorítmico, evolutivo o social. Para terminar, en este libro se propone un nuevo acercamiento al estudio de la complejidad lingüística dentro del marco de las Ciencias de la Complejidad.

L'auteur conçoit la modalité comme une catégorie sémantico-fonctionnelle, indépendante des éléments qui l'expriment et du niveau de la structure grammaticale dont ils relèvent. Pour définir la modalité, il tient compte également de ses caractéristiques structurelles ainsi que de phénomènes relevant de niveaux cognitifs plus hauts et plus bas. Cela permet de porter un regard critique sur les recherches antérieures, de développer un cadre théorique conciliant les différentes approches et d'analyser systématiquement les expressions de la modalité en français (verbes et adverbes modaux, modes verbaux etc.). L'interaction entre plusieurs éléments modaux dans le même énoncé peut déclencher trois types d'interaction et produit des phénomènes modaux particulièrement complexes.

Die Publikation zu Sprachwandelprozessen im Russischen und Ukrainischen beschreibt eine ausschlaggebende Phase der neueren Sprachgeschichte Russlands und der Ukraine (1985-2008). Im Fokus steht die Anglisierung als eine der Haupttendenzen der aktuellen sprachlichen Destandardisierung europäischer Sprachen. Die Autorin zeigt am Beispiel der Anglisierung in der Werbesprache die Destandardisierung des Russischen und Ukrainischen nach 1985 auf. Diese korpusbasierte Untersuchung umfasst sowohl die quantitative (statistische) als auch die qualitative (systemlinguistische) Analyse des werbesprachlichen Korpus. Die quantitative chronologische Analyse belegt die deutlich stärkere Dynamik der Anglisierung im Ukrainischen nach 1998. Die qualitative Analyse illustriert die unterschiedlichen bzw. gemeinsamen innerlinguistischen Prozesse in beiden Sprachen, insbesondere Anglizismen-Integration und Standardisierungswege.

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.

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.

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.

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.