Ukrainian: A Comprehensive Grammar
... Last but not least, the task to determine the most relevant International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbol for the given Ukrainian sound is a complicated undertaking that requires collecting representative experimental data, performing profound comparative analysis of the multi-lingual phonetic material, and basing on good command in the IPA notations. For example, incorrect interpretation of the description of a Ukrainian voiced fricative sound of the Cyrillic grapheme "г" given in Bilodid (1969), Tocjka (1981) resulted in Danylenko & Vakulenko (1995), Press & Pugh (2015) in its wrong representation by the symbol "h" that denotes a voiceless sound in the IPA. ...
... The sound of the Ukrainian phoneme /gh/ (Cyrillic /г/) is often rendered through English "h" (see Danylenko & Vakulenko, 1995;Press & Pugh, 2015) that is not advisable. In particular, it was posited that the Ukrainian /gh/ (/г/) is pronounced "close to English h in house, but with more voice and less aspiration" (Press & Pugh, 2015: 18). ...
The acoustic and articulatory properties of Ukrainian consonant phones were investigated, and a full set of relevant IPA notations was proposed for these and compiled in a table. Acoustic correspondence of Ukrainian phones to those appearing in European languages was analyzed and discussed. Special attention was paid to the phonemes /v/ (represented in Cyrillic script as “/в/”) and /gh/ (ren-dered in Cyrillic script as “/г/”) that cause the most difficulties in their description. In particular, our experiments and observations suggest that a standard Ukrainian phoneme /v/ is realised as labiodental fricatives [v] and [vj] before vowels and also as sonorant bilabial approximants [β̞β̞˛ β̞ɔ] between a vowel and a consonant, in the initial position before consonants and after a vowel at the end of a word, and sometimes is devoiced to [v̥] in the coda after a voiceless consonant. In some utterances after a vowel (before a consonant and in the coda), a strongly rounded bilabial approximant [β̞ɔ] may approach a non-syllabic semivowel [ṷ]. These con-clusions are in good agreement with the consonantal status of the Ukrainian lan-guage and with the general tendencies of sound combinations in the world languages. The findings of this research contribute to better understanding of Ukrain-ian and its special features in comparison with other world languages that may have substantial practical use in various phonetic and translation studies, as well as in modern linguistic technologies aimed at artificial intelligence development, machine translation incorporating text-to-speech conversion, automatic speech analysis, recognition and synthesis, and in other areas of applied linguistics.
Key words: Ukrainian consonant phone set, International Phonetic Alphabet, visual analysis of articulation, bilabial approximant, text-to-speech technology.
... In Ukrainian language, masculine gendered animate and inanimate nouns typically have consonant endings (e.g., дім [dim]house), while feminine gender is predicted by -a / -я endings (e.g., кава [kava]coffee, iсторiя [istoriia]history). Most abstract nouns are feminine (Pugh & Press, 1999), regardless of the ending (e.g., радiсть [radist']joy, тиша [tysha]quiet). Neuter nouns have three possible endings: (Bezpoiasko et al., 1993;Gorpynyč, 2004). ...
This paper examines the linguistic relativity principle (Whorf, 1956) by investigating the impact of grammatical gender on cognition in simultaneous bilinguals of three-gendered Ukrainian and Russian. It examines whether speakers of three-gendered languages show grammatical gender effects on categorisation, empirically addressing claims that such effects are insignificant due to the presence of the neuter gender (Sera et al., 2002). We conducted two experiments using a similarity judgement paradigm while manipulating the presence of neuter gender stimuli (Phillips & Boroditsky, 2003). Experiment 1, including neuter gender, revealed no significant effects, compatible with earlier studies on three-gendered languages. Conversely, Experiment 2, excluding neuter gender stimuli, showed significant language effects. Bilingual participants rated pairs as more similar when grammatical genders in both languages were congruent with the biological sex of a character. Significant effects were also found for pairs with mismatching grammatical genders in Ukrainian and Russian. Participants with higher proficiency in Ukrainian rated pairs as more similar when the grammatical gender of a noun in Ukrainian was congruent with the character’s biological sex, and incongruent in Russian. Our findings thus provide the first empirical demonstration that the exclusion of neuter gender online induces grammatical gender effects in speakers of three-gendered languages.
... The classification of /ɔ/ as either mid-low or mid-height has been debated, with different IPA notations in use. Buk et al. (2008), Pompino-Marschall et al. (2017), and Press and Pugh (2015) use /ɔ/, while Vakulenko (2010Vakulenko ( , 2018 argues for /o/. Vakulenko (2010Vakulenko ( , 2018 points out that the Ukrainian mid-back vowel exhibits flattening effects on a preceding consonant-a property typical for /o/ but not /ɔ/. ...
Mid-vowel contrasts often present perceptual challenges for speakers of languages that lack these distinctions. However, bilingual speakers, who have access to two phonological systems and exhibit greater metalinguistic awareness, might not necessarily encounter such difficulties. In this study, 27 Ukrainian–Russian bilinguals listened to an unfamiliar language, European Portuguese, and completed two tasks: an identification task where they assimilated the seven stressed oral Portuguese vowels to the closest Ukrainian categories and a discrimination task featuring the Portuguese vowel contrasts /ɛ/–/e/, /e/–/i/, /ɔ/–/o/, and /o/–/u/. No bilingual advantage was observed: the discrimination performance on all contrasts was slightly above or near a chance level (A-prime scores varied between 0.55 and 0.20). These perceptual difficulties may be attributed to the acoustic similarities between the vowels within the contrasts rather than to the differences between the phonological inventories of the languages (the most challenging contrast was not a mid-vowel contrast but acoustically similar /o/–/u/). Although with the back mid-vowel contrast, the difficulty seems to also stem from the possibility that both Ukrainian and Russian have only one back mid-vowel, /o/, and this category occupies a wider area in the vowel space of Ukrainian–Russian bilinguals. The results suggest that bilingual advantage does not always manifest itself in the perception of a new language, especially if two typologically close languages are involved.
... We relied on the sources described in Sections 1-3 that contained Ukrainian verb and noun lists with their description. In those sources, we identified the properties of verbs and objects that were classified according to their role in the choice of the object case (Timberlake 1975;Vyxovanec' 1992;Pugh, Press 1999;Vyxovanec', Horodens'ka 2004;Pljušč 2005;Mežov 2008;Ševčuk 2010;Pljušč 2018;Šypovyč, Іhnatolja, Dančenko 2020). More specifically, concerning the 'aspectual' testing factor 1 for the corpus study, one relevant point raised in previous literature concerns the distinction between perfective and imperfective: the Ukrainian partitive genitive is known to appear with perfective and not with imperfective verbs (Pljušč 2005, 107;2018, 120). ...
p>The volume collects contributions that were presented at the PARTE workshop in Budapest in September 2022 or at the Partitive Online Talks, with the goal of investigating the universal and varying properties of partitive constructions and partitive elements. Since the expression of partitivity in Romance languages has been studied extensively, in this volume special attention is paid to other European languages, such as Germanic, Gaelic, Finno-Ugric and Slavic languages. With data from microvariation and variation that spans over vast geographical distances and involves various contact situations, this volume brings new insights into what is universal and what is particular in partitive constructions and elements in Europe.</p
... We relied on the sources described in Sections 1-3 that contained Ukrainian verb and noun lists with their description. In those sources, we identified the properties of verbs and objects that were classified according to their role in the choice of the object case (Timberlake 1975;Vyxovanec' 1992;Pugh, Press 1999;Vyxovanec', Horodens'ka 2004;Pljušč 2005;Mežov 2008;Ševčuk 2010;Pljušč 2018;Šypovyč, Іhnatolja, Dančenko 2020). More specifically, concerning the 'aspectual' testing factor 1 for the corpus study, one relevant point raised in previous literature concerns the distinction between perfective and imperfective: the Ukrainian partitive genitive is known to appear with perfective and not with imperfective verbs (Pljušč 2005, 107;2018, 120). ...
p>The volume collects contributions that were presented at the PARTE workshop in Budapest in September 2022 or at the Partitive Online Talks, with the goal of investigating the universal and varying properties of partitive constructions and partitive elements. Since the expression of partitivity in Romance languages has been studied extensively, in this volume special attention is paid to other European languages, such as Germanic, Gaelic, Finno-Ugric and Slavic languages. With data from microvariation and variation that spans over vast geographical distances and involves various contact situations, this volume brings new insights into what is universal and what is particular in partitive constructions and elements in Europe.</p
... The approach proposed in this paper is designed for the scenario where for a highly-inflected language there exists a hand-crafted static morphological lexicon that covers potentially irregular and more frequent lexical core. For extending this lexicon to cover new regularly inflected entities I use an internet corpus and small inflection tables from grammar textbooks, e.g., (Hryshchenko et al., 1997), (Press and Pugh, 2015): such resources would often be available for other lowresourced languages, since the tasks that would require linguistic expertise (i.e., creating the core lexicon and inflection tables) need to be done only once, so paradigms for new entities can be automatically created whenever a new corpus becomes available. Core static morphological lexicons have been developed for several low-resourced languages, either as stand-alone resources or within shared frameworks, such as Universal Dependencies (Nivre et al., 2016), Apertium (Forcada et al., 2011) (in the context of Machine Translation) or Grammatical Framework (Ranta, 2011) (in limited subject domains). ...
The paper presents an unsupervised method for quickly extending a Ukrainian lexicon by generating paradigms and morphological feature structures for new Named Entities and neologisms, which are not covered by existing static morphological resources. This approach addresses a practical problem of modelling paradigms for entities created by the dynamic processes in the lexicon: this problem is especially serious for highly-inflected languages in domains with specialised or quickly changing lexicon. The method uses an unannotated Ukrainian corpus and a small fixed set of inflection tables, which can be found in traditional grammar textbooks. The advantage of the proposed approach is that updating the morphological lexicon does not require training or linguistic annotation, allowing fast knowledge-light extension of an existing static lexicon to improve morphological coverage on a specific corpus. The method is implemented in an open-source package on a GitHub repository. It can be applied to other low-resourced inflectional languages which have internet corpora and linguistic descriptions of their inflection system, following the example of inflection tables for Ukrainian. Evaluation results shows consistent improvements in coverage for Ukrainian corpora of different corpus types.
... The approach proposed in this paper is designed for the scenario where for a highly-inflected language there exists a hand-crafted static morphological lexicon that covers potentially irregular and more frequent lexical core. For extending this lexicon to cover new regularly inflected entities I use an internet corpus and small inflection tables from grammar textbooks, e.g., (Hryshchenko et al., 1997), (Press and Pugh, 2015): such resources would often be available for other lowresourced languages, since the tasks that would require linguistic expertise (i.e., creating the core lexicon and inflection tables) need to be done only once, so paradigms for new entities can be automatically created whenever a new corpus becomes available. Core static morphological lexicons have been developed for several low-resourced languages, either as stand-alone resources or within shared frameworks, such as Universal Dependencies (Nivre et al., 2016), Apertium (Forcada et al., 2011) (in the context of Machine Translation) or Grammatical Framework (Ranta, 2011) (in limited subject domains). ...
This paper presents a methodology for rapid development of Ukrainian morphological disambiguation resources for a Ukrainian part-of-speech (PoS) tagger and lemmatiser now used in our hybrid MT system. The work is motivated by the need to disambiguate morphological features that result in different translations in rule-based MT and to address out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problem in statistical MT by training factored models. Without morphological disambiguation a larger training or development corpus would be needed to achieve acceptable coverage. Ukrainian, as many other under-resourced languages, does not have publicly released wide-coverage morphological annotation resources in standardised form. However, it has a smaller-scale non-disambiguating tagger with a lexicon of 15k frequent lemmas, which covers 200k unique word forms and generates on average 1.5 ambiguous tags per token (Kotsyba et al., 2009). It is based on a systematic linguistic description and a rich tagset for the Ukrainian morphology developed within the MULTEXT-East project (Erjavec, 2012; Kotsyba et al., 2010). On the other hand, for a better-resourced language, such as Russian, there exist open morphological disambiguation resources, e.g., parameter files for the language-independent TnT tagger trained on a large manually annotated Russian corpus, with estimated tag emission and transition probabilities (Sharoff, Nivre, 2011). Our methodology is based on the assumption that the syntax and morphology in historically related languages change slower than the lexicon, so sentences in them should normally have similar sequences of corresponding morphological features, even when large parts of the lexicon are no longer cognate. Under this assumption, the transition probabilities for the Ukrainian tags are estimated via systematically mapping the tags in the Russian transition parameter file into the Ukrainian tagset. This mapping is not straightforward and requires linguistic expertise in both languages, as even closely related languages have many unique category/value combinations, resulting in different tagsets. Nevertheless, the development time is much smaller than would be required for manually annotating the Ukrainian corpus needed for training the TnT tagger from scratch. Our baseline system described in this paper gives only an unsupervised approximation of the tag sequences in the Ukrainian corpus. It also uses tag emissions that are trivially derived from the seed lexicon, with equal probability settings for tags emitted by ambiguous word forms, and only lemmas mapped or disambiguated from the sample lexicon. However, this baseline is relatively strong as it gives an acceptable accuracy and coverage for morphological annotation tasks. We report evaluation results for the Ukrainian news corpus and we outline techniques for improving the baseline system, which include iterative re-estimation of emission and transition probabilities and iterative learning of rewriting operations for lemmatisation of previously unseen word forms. Resources are made freely available in a public domain on http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/svitlana/tnt/ua/.
... The relevant examples from Ukrainian, taken from Pugh and Press (1999), are provided in (27) (27) and (28) demonstrate that under negation, both genitive and accusative case-assignment to an object is possible. Pugh and Press point out that casemarking under negation is dependent on definiteness, with accusative case being assigned to definite objects. ...
This chapter focuses on case-assignment to objects of intensional verbs. It is demonstrated how the analysis of Irrealis Genitive proposed in Chap. 4account for the distribution of Irrealis Genitive in clauses that contain intensional predicates. Intensional Genitive is licensed only by those verbs which also license subjunctive mood, i.e. weak intensional verbs. This fact is accounted for under the present analysis, which relates Irrealis Genitiv to the absence of REC and treats them as a counterpart of subjunctive mood within the nominal domain. Two types of interpretations of sentences with weak intensional verbs are further distinguished: Location-Oriented Attitude and Instantiation-Oriented Attitude. The relation between these types of interpretation, case-marking and REC is discussed. The chapter also discusses case-related properties of individual intensional verbs, as well as certain syntactic restrictions that affect the distribution of genitive case-marking.
... The choice between the alternative endings in column 1 is partly predictable (see e.g. Pugh andPress 1999:70f. andShevelov 1993:958 for overviews). ...
... De Bray 1969: 69-70;Pugh and Press 1999: 1-6. See also Martel 1938. 10 This long period of Polish cultural domination was punctuated but not interrupted by the brief tsarist occupation of Galicia in World War I, which gave the region a foretaste of Russian imperialism's plans for the last bastion of 'Little Russian' particularism. ...
This article investigates the phenomenon of partial productivity within a phonological system, focusing on the alternation of mid vowels [ɔ] and [ɛ] with [i] in specific morphological contexts. Traditionally regarded as a historical remnant with limited relevance to contemporary grammatical competence, this study reexamines the phenomenon, emphasizing its partial productivity in modern phonological systems. Adopting a synchronic perspective, the analysis proposes that this alternation functions as a cyclic lexical transformation governed by specific morpho-phonological conditions, including underlying [ɔ] or [ɛ], a derived "jer" environment, and the presence of a closed syllable. The alternation, however, is not uniformly applied across all contexts, revealing distinct patterns of productivity and constraint. The study explores both systematic instances of the alternation and notable exceptions, suggesting that while the process is active in certain linguistic environments, it is restricted in others due to lexical, morphological, and phonological factors. This partial productivity reflects its integration within contemporary phonological competence, shaped by dynamic interactions between historical legacies and modern linguistic rules. The article provides a detailed analysis of these patterns, offering a framework that accounts for variability and encourages further empirical research to deepen understanding. By synthesizing synchronic and diachronic perspectives, this study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of phonological alternations and their role in shaping complex linguistic systems.
Aspect, the perfective-imperfective contrast, is a universal phenomenon, part of man's cognitive organization to reflect objective/subjective reality by conceptualizing referents of verbs and of nominals/NPs standing for participants in situations as temporal entities, residing in speaker-hearers' heads and interacting between each other. Aspect is instantiated across languages through two archetypes: verbal aspect (VA)-grammatical, as in the Slavic languages, including Ukrainian; compositional aspect (CA)-complex semantico-syntactic, sporadically dependent on pragmatic discourse elements, as in English. The paper explores Ukrainian language data to, first, confirm that CA, realized mainly as a very complex interplay of sentence components, exists not only in CA languages but, albeit peripherally, also in VA languages, including Ukrainian. Second, to find out how Ukrainian aspect is realized in sentences with biaspectual verbs and particular numbers of situation-participant NPs: three, two, one. The referents of verbs and of nominals/NPs standing for participants in situations in both VA and CA languages are part of the never-ending process of thinking and perpetual resorting to memory and is not some abstract self-contained system of symbols divorced from human cognition. Phrased otherwise, aspect, especially CA, cannot be understood within the domain of traditional grammar and mainstream linguistics with their naivist notions ignoring man's cognitive capacity and maintaining, inter alia, that nominals/NPs are concrete/physical or abstract entities. The study of matter is ordained to physics. Linguistics is obliged to investigate not the material world but how language reflects this world and other possible (imaginable) worlds. A simple analogue is a woman in a mirror: it is not a material object but an image of a woman; likewise, a woman referred to through language is not a material object but a token of a woman. Hence, NP referents of material things are not physical entities but images of such entities, fully describable, and their kineticism is handled by verb referents, whereby the intricate CA mechanism, which is cognitive, can be observed, albeit peripherally, also in VA languages, including Ukrainian. Keywords: compositional and verbal aspect, Ukrainian, biaspectuality, NP-V-NP mapping of (non-)boundedness.
This paper continues an article devoted to the linguistic description of the local dialect of Vyšneve, cf. DiG 30 (2022), 23–49. The present study, as previously mentioned, completes a piece of a more comprehensive dialectal and sociolinguistic research on the dialects spoken along the Ukrainian-Belarusian and, to a minor extent, Russian borders. This is a territorial segment located in the eastern Polissian macro region and, more precisely, in the north-western part of the Region of Černihiv (Ukraine). In this continuation, the analysed material describes basic verbal morphology, the ways of expressing modality, the most evident syntactic and lexical features of this local dialect.
We explore the effects of prolonged contact with Croatian on the inflexional morphology of number-marking in the Istro-Romanian noun. One result of a reorganization of the nominal system is that certain bisyllabic plural desinences, originally associated with feminine gender, are reassigned to the masculine, and come to exist alongside other modes of masculine plural marking. The resultant variation in masculine plural inflexion becomes subject to new patterns of distribution which are clearly sensitive to Croatian models, including the exaptation of masculine plural morphology to provide distinctive specialized morphological marking of plurals in certain numeral quantifier expressions for ‘smaller’ numbers, in ways clearly reminiscent of Croatian. What is involved is a complex array of ‘pattern’ borrowing, although there is also some evidence for ‘matter’ borrowing of a dialectal Croatian plural ending which Istro-Romanian sometimes uses in numeral quantifier phrases with higher numerals. Overall, we seem to be in the presence of an emergent ‘numerative’. While the creation of numeratives is well known from the internal history of various languages, our data may show that they may also emerge through language contact.
Chernihiv) represents a minor segment of a larger research project devoted to the study of the local dialects spoken in the uttermost northwestern area of the region of Chernihiv. These dialects, according to a largely accepted classification, are attributed to the northeastern Ukrainian (or Polissian) dialectal territory and are more specifically known as “transitional from Ukrainian to Belarusian”. Because of the predominantly descriptive character adopted in this paper, some theoretical implications and debatable issues will not be discussed here. The most significant geo-historical facts about this rural village, in line with the dialectological practice and the methodology applied for the collection of data, are delineated in the introductory sections. Central to this study is the description and analysis of the most substantial dialectal features of this local dialect. Their characteristics are examined considering the usual linguistic parameters: phoneticphonology, derivation (to a minor extent), morphology, syntax, and lexis. The fact that Zaderi¿vka is reported (point number 65) in the Atlas Ukraїns’koї Movy [Atlas of the Ukrainian Language] favours comparison with other local varieties, and it is useful to identify recent trends and possible undergoing changes in the examined dialect. The dialectal data analyzed in this paper aim, on the one hand, to increase the already available factual material and, on the other, to foster further theoretical reflections about the origin of these border dialects. Keywords: East Slavic dialectology, North Ukrainian (East Polissian) dialects, Zaderiїvka, local dialect, border dialects
Focusing on language contact involving Russian, and the linguistic varieties that emerged from that contact in different social settings, this book analyzes issues and methodologies in reconstructing both the linguistic effects of language contact and the social contexts of usage. In-depth analyses of Odessan Russian, a southern Russian contact variety with Yiddish and Ukrainian elements, and Russian lexifier pidgins illustrate the reconstruction process, which involves making the most of all available documentation, particularly literature and stereotypical descriptions. Historical sociolinguistics of this kind straddles the fields of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and contact; this book brings together the methods and theories of these areas to show how they can result in a rich reconstruction of linguistic and socially-conditioned variation. We reconstruct the circumstances and social settings that produced this variation, and demonstrate how to reconstruct which variants were used by different types of speakers under different circumstances, and what kinds of social identities they indexed.
The linguistic description of the dialect of Vyšneve (Černihiv, Ukraine) can be considered a milestone of a more comprehensive dialectal and sociolinguistic study on the dialects spoken along the Ukrainian-Belarusian and, to a lesser extent, Russian border areas of eastern Polissia. Some of the most representative features of the Vyšneve dialect and its relation to Belarusian have already been the object of previous linguistic analysis.
The village is situated about 35 km north-east of the city of Černihiv (regional centre); 12 km south-east of the town of Ripky (former district centre). The distance to the Belarusian border is approximately 35 kilometers. Only the former district of Horodjans’k separates Vyšneve from the region of Brjansk (Russian Federation).
The factual material examined in this article aims to complete previous research gaps and, at the same time, intends to foster further theoretical reflections about the origin of these border dialects. The analysis of this local dialect (which includes the phonetic-phonological, morpho-syntactic and lexical levels) in fact lays the foundation for successive and more advanced stages of research on the Ukrainian-Belarusian-Russian border dialects. In this contribution the dialectal features will be systematically compared with both the neighbouring Belarusian dialects spoken along the Ukrainian-Belarusian continuum and with the nearby southern Russian dialects, particularly with their western group. The latter, in fact, shares with the neighbouring Ukrainian and Belarusian border dialects a series of isoglosses and idiosyncratic traits.
In modern Turkish, the apostrophe is used to separate proper names from inflectional endings ( İzmir’de ‘in İzmir’). This is not the case with inflected common nouns ( şehirde ‘in the city’). In this respect, the apostrophe constitutes an instance of graphematic dissociation between proper names and common nouns. Interestingly, the apostrophe was originally employed to transliterate hamza and ayn in Arabic and Persian loanwords ( san’at ‘art’). However, these loanwords gradually lost the apostrophe ( sanat ‘art’). This implies that Turkish experienced a graphematic change whereby the apostrophe developed from a phonographic marker of glottal stop into a morphographic marker of morpheme boundaries in proper names. This refunctionalization process is illustrated by a diachronic corpus analysis based on selected issues of the newspaper Cumhuriyet from 1929–1975. The findings reveal that the use of the apostrophe with proper names was triggered by foreignness. More specifically, the apostrophe first occurred with foreign names to highlight morpheme boundaries ( Eden’in ‘of Eden’) and then expanded to native names via animacy ( Doğan’ın ‘of Doğan’).
Competition takes many forms. A newly identified type of competition involves the featural specification of one of the competitors as a key factor. In the particular instance treated here, whether a given item has a competitor depends on its number (and sometimes its person). We focus on the use of the genitive case versus adjective-like forms in possessive expressions (broadly understood). The data come primarily from the Slavonic languages, where a surprising original system of possessive pronouns competing with personal pronouns has played out rather differently through the family. We find a variety of outcomes, from conservative to highly innovative, with some instances of competitors settling into different niches.
Based on linguistic literature, corpus data and elicitation, this paper offers a description of polar question coding strategies in Croatian and presents their diachronic development. Under the assumption that
pragmatically motivated features such as polar question markers are areally diffuse, Croatian is put in the context of European languages. An overview of interrogative constructions in selected ancient and modern languages is presented, showing that there are certain areal tendencies, which are reflected in Croatian as well, and that the development of particular interrogative constructions in Croatian may be interpreted in accordance with these tendencies.
Morphonotactics determines phonological conditions on sound sequences produced by morphological operations both with morphemes and across boundaries. This paper examines the historical emergence and the development of morphonotactic consonant clusters in Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Romance and other languages. It examines the role of the following morphological preference parameters: (i) morphotactic transparency/opacity, (ii) morphosemantic transparency/opacity, (iii) morphological richness. We identify several diachronic processes involved in cluster emergence, production and change: vowel loss, Indo-European ablaut (and comparable Arabic processes), affixation, compounding, metathesis, final and consonant epenthesis. Additionally, we discuss predictions derived from the Net Auditory Distance principle, psycholinguistic evidence and language acquisition. We show that the majority of morphonotactic clusters arise, phonologically, from vowel loss, and morphologically from concatenation.
We examined case‐marking variation in heritage Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Comparing heritage to homeland Polish and Ukrainian speakers, we found only a few types and a few tokens of systematic distinction between heritage and homeland varieties. A total of 6,291 instances of nouns and pronouns were extracted from transcribed conversations with 62 speakers. Comparing normative forms to observed forms in logistic regression analyses showed that the form of the nominal and the case selector have significant effects on the rate of match between normative and observed forms, while declension does not. Most mismatches in the heritage data were replaced by the nominative, a pattern which is also occasionally found in homeland speech. The second most frequent pattern is genitive–accusative mismatch in specific contexts, in both heritage and homeland speech. Importantly, no significant differences between homeland and heritage speakers emerged, with 8% mismatch attested in the heritage and 2% in homeland data.
Acoustic and articulatory properties of Ukrainian vowels are investigated in this study and a full set of relevant IPA notations are proposed. The notations are shown in the vowel diagram and the table. The results of the earlier acoustic invariant speech analysis based on special software, auditory and spectrum analysis were used and the results are discussed in the context of general and Ukrainian phonetic laws governing language evolution and acoustic properties of non-stressed vowels in relation to their stressed cognates. Such combined approach resulted in a more detailed vowel inventory than proposed heretofore. The findings of this research contribute to better understanding of Ukrainian language and its special features in comparison with other world languages that may have substantial practical use in various phonetic and translation studies, as well as in modern linguistic technologies aimed at artificial intelligence development, machine translation incorporating text-to-speech conversion, automatic speech analysis, recognition and synthesis, and in other areas of applied linguistics.
This paper elaborates on the developmental scenario of relative clauses in East Slavonic. Premised on a system of areal, diachronic, and sociotypological criteria, the author offers a cross-dialectal typology of relative clause types and their overt linkage markers both inflected U jakyj, B jaki, R kakoj; U kotryj, B katory, R kotoryj ‘which’ and uninflected U ščo, B što, R čto ‘what’; U de, B dze, R gde ‘where’. I argue that, instead of a unilateral developmental trend from the free juxtaposition of clauses to hypotaxis to subordination, one should distinguish between two developmental clines (micro-pathways), one leading from parataxis to paratactic subordination and the second conducive to hypotactic subordination in East Slavonic. In the view of parallel relativization strategies in other Indo-European languages, in particular German dialects, I maintain that the formation of paratactic and hypotactic subordination is dependent on a historically prevalent type of discourse within a language community. Such a type is preconditioned by a particular number of societal factors, including the amount of language contact (based on adult second-language learning). The latter is likely to bring about reduction in syntagmatic redundancy leading to a ‘simpler’ syntactic organization, in particular the development of paratactic subordination.
The genitive/accusative opposition in Slavic languages is a decades-old linguistic conundrum. Shedding new light on this perplexing object-case alternation in Russian, this volume analyzes two variants of genitive objects that alternate with accusative complements—the genitive of negation and the intensional genitive. The author contends that these variants are manifestations of the same phenomenon, and thus require an integrated analysis. Further, that the choice of case is sensitive to factors that fuse semantics and pragmatics, and that the genitive case is assigned to objects denoting properties at the same time as they lack commitment to existence.
Kagan’s subtle analysis accounts for the complex relations between case-marking and other properties, such as definiteness, specificity, number and aspect. It also reveals a correlation between the genitive case and the subjunctive mood, and relates her overarching subject matter to other instances of differential object-marking.
Ukrainian Studies have undoubtedly assisted at a rapid international proliferation in the last decades. Outside Ukraine, Austro-German and North American scholars have played an essential role in popularizing Ukrainian linguistic and sociolinguistic issues. The same cannot be said for the Italian Slavistic and Ukrainistic tradition, where, notwithstanding consistent contributions on Ukrainian culture, literature, history, language history and translation, papers devoted to linguistic issues and/or aimed at a formal description of the Ukrainian language are almost inexistent. Even among Italian linguists, and despite the large presence of Ukrainian communities in Italy, very little is known about this language. For the reasons just expressed, we undertake, in this article, the task to provide a preliminary description of Ukrainian aimed at Italian academic readers.
To denote an agent in any passivoid construction in modern literary Ukrainian there is no choice but to employ the bare instrumental. Historically however, Middle Ukrainian allowed for more syntactic variation within the realm of oblique subjects. The present contribution deals with the productivity of such agent expressions throughout the course of the Middle Ukrainian period and their distribution across the different text types in canonical passives, participial passives and in -no / -to structures with a direct object complement. This investigation is based on a medium-sized corpus of Middle Ukrainian texts compiled from the electronic resources available on izbornyk.org.ua.
Some languages use a special form of the noun (a ‘numerative’) after some or all numerals. In such languages, a distinct numerative is typically not available for all nouns, but rather only for a small subset, forming a morphological “minor category” (Corbett 2000). We examine how such a system emerges and disintegrates diachronically, looking in detail at Welsh, a language in which a distinct numerative emerged as the result of the phonological attrition of plural suffixes and analogical extension of new plural suffixes to all relevant syntactic environments except after numerals. Nouns with distinct numeratives tend to be animate and to denote units frequently counted, an association previously noted also for minor duals (Plank 1996). We suggest that this association arose in Welsh via differential analogical extension in two directions: animates resisted analogical extension of the pattern numeral + singular noun; and animates were most receptive to extension of the pattern numeral + numerative. We show that the loss of the numerative proceeded the same way in reverse: numeratives were first reanalysed as special plurals, and this pattern, numeral + plural, resisted analogical spread of the dominant numeral + singular pattern most robustly with kinship terms and a unit of time, namely ‘year’. These developments show much commonality with other cases where the diachrony of the numerative is known, confirming the observation that numeratives typically emerge from the disintegration of a major category, such as plural or dual, and that they are diachronically unstable, liable ultimately to analogical elimination.
This chapter introduces the phenomenon of genitive objects and the genitive / accusative alternation in Russian. Three types of genitive objects are considered: Partitive Genitive, Genitive of Negation and Intensional Genitive. I further argue for a reorganization of this phenomenon. I claim that, as originally proposed by Neidle (Neidle, Carol. 1988. The Role of Case in Russian Syntax. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers), Genitive of Negation and Intensional Genitive constitute two instantiations of the same phenomenon and should be provided a unified account. The two types of genitive case-assignment are characterized by the same semantic tendencies, are licensed in the presence of a local non-veridical operator and exhibit essentially the same pattern of historical development and cross-linguistic distribution. It is concluded that these types of genitive instantiate the same phenomenon, which will be refered to as Irrealis Genitive and which will constitute the focus of the present study. It is further argued that Partitive Genitive does not constitute another instance of Irrealis Genitive, as it differs substantially from the other types of non-canonical genitive case in terms of its properties.
Over the last sixty years, comitatives and instrumentals have attracted the attention of many linguists of different theoretical convictions. In contrast, their logical negative counterpart, the abessive, constitutes still largely unexplored territory, cross-linguistically. In the very few studies that mention it, the abessive is often depicted as the negated comitative/instrumental which, together with the comitative/ instrumental itself, forms a functional opposition of categories (Seiler 2000:172). This practice is suggestive of a micro-system made up of at least two categories, namely, comitative/instrumental and abessive, one of which (abessive) is the negation of the other (comitative/instrumental). Previous studies suggest, on the one hand, that there is evidence for a certain degree of interdependency of the categories under scrutiny and, on the other, that the relationship comes in a variety of shapes which render the opposition of comitative/instrumental vs. abessive much more diverse than expected. In what follows, we give an account of abessives in comparison to comitatives/instrumentals in a worldwide convenience sample of 239 languages. Our approach is functional-typological in the broadest sense of the term. Methodologically, we rely heavily upon the traditional criteria for determining markedness values (Greenberg 1966, Mayerthaler 1981), with the addition of the concepts recently proposed by Wälchli (2005).
In the domains of both inflection and derivation, there is evidence for both rules of exponence (which realize specific morphosyntactic properties or derivational categories through the introduction of specific morphological markings) and rules of composition (which determine how such rules of exponence apply in the definition of a compound’s inflected forms or derivatives). A single, general rule of composition accounts for the definition of a wide range of derivatives from compound bases; nevertheless, ordinal derivation demonstrates the considerable extent to which rules of composition may vary across languages. Evidence from a diverse range of languages is used to motivate a typology of ordinal derivation whose distinct types embody different rules of composition.
Recent work in grammaticalization has highlighted cases where former inflectional affixes have gained independence on an unexpected path towards clitic or full-word status. Such cases challenge the hypothesized unidirectionality of grammaticalization at the formal level (word > clitic > affix). This article considers two cases from Slavonic languages: in the first, various Slavonic languages reidentified a former conditional-mood person-number inflection as the present tense of the perfect auxiliary 'be'; in the second, the genitive singular -a inflection of Bulgarian masculine nouns was reidentified as a form of the definite article. In both cases, a former inflectional affix came to be identified with some other pre-existing less bound morph, allowing the languages to eliminate some inflectional category: person-number inflection on the conditional and case inflection on nouns respectively. These cases are part of general patterns of degrammaticalization in which obsolescent morphological markers are reassigned to productive functions, whether to an existing morph or to create a new morph (exaptation-adaptation). Since the new morph may be of any grammatical type, and language learners do not compare the new status of the morph with its old status, this inevitably leaves open the possibility of degrammaticalization if the new function of the morph happens to be less grammatical or more phonologically independent than its old function.
Various social institutions as well as the Ministry of Education acknowledge the sociocultural heterogeneity and linguistic diversity of the current school population. These represent a unique richness and require the creation of innovating conditions and strategies for teaching so as to both preserve the multicultural richness which stems from the contact between recentlyarrived pupils from various contexts and, simultaneously, support these children in the acquisition of Portuguese as a second language and indispensable guarantee for their academic success. In this paper we report on the Linguistic Diversity In Portuguese Schools project which was carried out between 2003 and 2007 and focussed on understanding the educational context of linguistic diversity. To do so, we began with a survey of the languages spoken by pupils during the first six years of education in primary schools within the greater Lisbon area. This study covered 410 schools and 74595 pupils originating from 75 different countries. In parallel to this work we have eveloped another project ¿ still underway until 2012 ¿ titled Bilinguism, learning Portuguese L2 and educational success. This project is more centered on the study and proposal of methodologies which would result in a satisfactory command of the Portuguese language.
Aspect is a general linguistic term utilised in the grammatical description of verbs; specifically, it is concerned with 'the way the grammar marks the duration of type of temporal activity denoted by the verb' (Crystal, 1991: 27). Originally used by specialists concerned with Slavic languages, in which aspect plays a key role, the concept of aspect has been shown to have significant implications for many other languages. In this article, the use of aspect and of aspectual markers in American Sign Language (ASL) will be explored. The argument to be presented is that ASL employs a variety of morphologically complex forms to express indications of aspect. For example, repetition and reduplication, changes in the direction of movement, changes in the nature of movement, changes in the speed of movement, changes in the use of space and spatial relations, as well as phonological changes, especially with respect to the use of a hold, all function to indicate aspectual distinctions in ASL. The morphological system for demonstrating aspectual relations will be explored, and implications for understanding aspect in the context of sign language linguistics will be discussed. Finally, comparisons will be made to similar phenomena in both British Sign Language and South African Sign Language.
This paper offers an analysis of Tense and Aspect as temporal predicates with complex interpretable content represented as
grammatical and abstract semantic features. Building on Klein (1995) and Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria (2000), it is proposed that although Tense and Aspect are distinct grammatical categories they both express a relation that can
be characterized as (non)-coincidence. Tense expresses (non)-coincidence of the utterance time and the assertion time, while
Aspect expresses (non)-coincidence of the assertion time and the situation time. Tense and Aspect are represented by a set
of two features: grammatical features [±past] and [±perf], and the abstract feature [±coin]. Thus, they have different grammatical content but the same abstract semantic content. This fine-grained distinction enables
us to capture the similarities and differences between the two categories. The interaction between the two types of features
together with the syntactic operation of feature agreement accounts for the temporo-aspectual interpretation of verbal morphology,
and it also derives the interaction between Tense and Aspect in languages such as Russian.
Exploring four principles of gender assignment from the perspective of Langacker's [Langacker, 1991, Langacker, 1999] Usage-Based Model, the present article has important implications both for theories of the way gender is assigned and for the Usage-Based Model itself. The model simultaneously facilitates the implementation of principles of rule ordering and “rule counting” and thus provides a unified account of these approaches, which have generally been held to be antagonistic. However, in addition to discussing the implementation and interaction of principles proposed by other students of gender assignment, the present study also introduces the Core Semantic Override Principle. While in general the proposed analysis lends support to the Usage-Based Model, the discussion of the Core Semantic Override Principle motivates certain amendments.
This paper argues that the neglect of impersonal constructions has had two significant consequences. The first is a descriptive misanalysis of individual constructions, illustrated by the `passive' treatment of `impersonal voice' forms in Finno-Ugric, and 'autonomous' forms in Celtic. The second consequence is an extended notion of `passive' that subsumes formally distinct subconstructions and exhibits variation that confounds attempts to impose substantive constraints. The conclusions drawn from 'impersonal passives' in Balto-Slavic illustrate the theoretical effects of this misclassification. A passive analysis of synchronically impersonal forms in -no/-to in Ukrainian has fostered the belief that passive constructions may retain structural accusative objects (Sobin 1985). A similar misclassification of -ta forms in Lithuanian underlies claims that passives may be formed from what Perlmutter 1978 calls 'initially unaccusative' verbs (Timberlake 1982, Nerbonne 1982). Since these patterns violate various laws proposed within Relational Grammar (RG), they have been interpreted as refuting relational analyses of the passive.
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