(PDF) Accusative Case in Slavic PPs

Perspectives on Slavistics III Hamburg, August 28-31, 2008 Organising Committee: Prof. Dr. Bernhard Brehmer, Department of Slavic Studies, University of Hamburg Prof. Dr. Schamma Schahadat, Department of Slavic Studies, University of Tübingen Dr. Beata Trawinski, Collaborative Research Center SFB 441, University of Tübingen Dr. Annette Werberger, Department of Slavic Studies, University of Tübingen Sponsors: List of presenters (in alphabetic order) Plenary Speakers DABROWSKI, PATRICE ................................................................................................................. 3 HENTSCHEL, GERD …………………………………………………………………………….. 4 IAMPOLSKI, MIKHAIL ………………………………………………………………………….. 5 , MAREK ………………………………………………………………….………….. 6 OLIVA, KAREL ………..……………………………………………………………………….. 7 ŠIPKA, DANKO ………………………………………………………………………………… 8 TIHANOV, GALIN ………………………………………………………….…………………… 10 Presenters of the Linguistic Sections A’BECKETT, LYUDMILLA ………………………………………………………….………….. 11 ANGELOV, KRASIMIR ………………………………………………………….……………… 11 ANSTATT, TANJA ………………………………………………………….…………………... 12 A , BOBAN & GEHRKE, BERIT ……………………………………………………... 13 BALKOVA, VALENTINA & YABLONSKY, SERGEY …………………………………………….. 15 BERMEL, NEIL ………………………………………………………….……………………... 17 BOCALE, PAOLA ………………………………………………………….…………………… 18 BREHMER, BERNHARD ………………………………………………………….…………….. 19 CETNAROWSKA, B ………………………………………………………….………….. 19 CETNAROWSKA, B & STAWNICKA, JADWIGA ………………………………………….. 21 DIESER, ELENA ………………………………………………………….…………………….. 23 DÜBBERS, VALENTIN ………………………………………………………….……………… 24 GALUTSKIKH, IRYNA ………………………………………………………….………………. 26 GASZ, AGNIESZKA ………………………………………………………….…………………. 27 GRAF, ELENA ………………………………………………………….……………………… 28 GWIAZDECKA, EWA ………………………………………………………….……………….. 29 HELLWIG-FABIAN, INESSA ………………………………………………………….………… 30 JANIC, KATARZYNA ………………………………………………………….……………….. 31 JUNCZYS-DOWMUNT, MARCIN ………………………………………………………….…….. 32 KOPOTEV, MIKHAIL ………………………………………………………….……………….. 33 KORIN, IGOR’ ………………………………………………………….……………………… 34 KRAVCHENKO, LYUDMYLA ………………………………………………………….………... 37 KRUMBHOLZ, GERTJE ………………………………………………………….……………... 38 KUBICKA, EMILIA ………………………………………………………….…………………. 39 LOIKOVA-NASSENKO, TATYANA & STIESSOVA, JITKA ……………………………………….. 40 MALYGINA, MARIA ………………………………………………………….………………... 41 MANOVA, STELA ………………………………………………………….…………………... 41 MEHLIG, HANS ROBERT ………………………………………………………….…………… 43 MUSHCHININA, MARIA ………………………………………………………….…………….. 43 NEREO, FILIPPO ………………………………………………………….……………………. 44 1 NOUZA, JAN, ŽD'ÁNSKÝ, J and ERVA, PETR ………………………………………… 45 OGIERMANN, EVA ………………………………………………………….…………………. 47 POLYAKOVA, SVETLANA ………………………………………………………….…………... 48 RABIEGA-W , JOANNA ………………………………………………………….….. 49 RABUS, ACHIM ………………………………………………………….…………………….. 50 ROMANENKO, ALINA ………………………………………………………….………………. 52 SALESCHUS, DIRK ………………………………………………………….…………………. 53 SCHAARSCHMIDT, GUNTER ………………………………………………………….………... 55 SHALAEVA, TATIANA ………………………………………………………….……………… 56 SNARSKA, ANIA ………………………………………………………….…………………… 57 SOKOLOVA, SVETLANA ………………………………………………………….……………. 58 SONNENHAUSER, BARBARA ………………………………………………………….……….. 59 SPRINGFIELD TOMELLERI, VITTORIO …………………………………………………………. 61 STERIOPOLO, OLGA ………………………………………………………….………………... 62 TASOVAC, TOMA ………………………………………………………….…………………... 63 THIELEMANN, NADINE ………………………………………………………….…………….. 65 T , BEATA ………………………………………………………….……………….. 67 UUSKÜLA, MARI ………………………………………………………….…………………... 69 WILSON, JAMES ………………………………………………………….…………………… 70 ZAGREBELNAYA, MARIA ………………………………………………………….………….. 71 MIGRODZKI, PIOTR &PRZYBYLSKA , RENATA ……………………………………………….. 73 Presenters of the Section on Literature and Cultural Studies BOELE, OTTO ………………………………………………………….……………………… 74 DE BRUYN , DIETER & DE DOBBELEER, MICHEL ……………………………………………… 75 GOMIDE, BRUNO ………………………………………………………….………………….. 76 HARTMANN, BERNHARD ………………………………………………………….…………... 77 KRIJANSKAIA, DASHA ………………………………………………………….…………….. 78 DE OLIVEIRA , CASSIO ………………………………………………………….……………... 79 SCHULTE, JÖRG ………………………………………………………….……………………. 80 STEWART, NEIL ………………………………………………………….……………………. 81 VERVAET, STIJN ………………………………………………………….…………………… 82 WANNER, ADRIAN ………………………………………………………….………………… 82 2 “Discovering” the Carpathians: Episodes in Imagining and Reshaping Alpine Borderland Regions DABROWSKI, PATRICE Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University (USA) E-Mail:

How can one speak of “discovering” segments of the Carpathian Mountains in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by which time the highlands had been not only penetrated but also to some extent settled? Key here is the way one defines “discovering.” In my view, it amounted to more than the identification of a newfound tourist attraction. By “discovery” I mean a new and special awareness of the highlands and highlanders on the part of “lowlanders” from outlying areas (here, mainly Poles and Ukrainians). Far from a passive encounter, the “discovering” would have important repercussions for the highland regions and their indigenous inhabitants. It also affected the discoverers, who were inspired to act by what they saw, and to act in ways that had the potential to disrupt traditional or preexisting relations between the peoples inhabiting the region, in some instances inspiring previously nonnational peoples to think of themselves in national terms. True “discoveries,” thus, are transformative – and not just in the sense of terra incognita becoming tourist destination but by their integration of these remote highlands and highlanders into a larger national narrative. In a book-length work on this subject, I examine the process of “discovery” for three distinct segments of the Carpathian Mountains: the Tatra Mountains (“discovered” in the last third of the nineteenth century), the Eastern Carpathians (between the two world wars), and the Bieszczady Mountains (after World War II). My keynote address concentrates on aspects of the second of these episodes, the “discovery” of the Eastern Carpathians and their indigenous inhabitants, the Hutsuls. The “discovery” of the region – at that time part of interwar Poland – was facilitated by the Society of Friends of the Hutsul Region previously active and influential organization was not only involved in the development of tourism, spas, and health resorts in the region, thus strengthening the local economy; it likewise supported the scholarly study of the region and its people. In the process, I argue, it provided a means for the Hutsuls to cope with the onslaught of development and´modernization while not devaluing their ancient traditions, colorful native dress, vigorous dialect, and highland way of life. This can be deduced from a close reading of publications in the Hutsul dialect sponsored by the Society. In this talk I focus on the messages conveyed by the Hutsul almanacs for the years 1935 and 1937, the first ever such publications in Hutsul dialect, as well as the motivations that lay behind their publication. Important individuals involved in the preparation of the almanacs were the Polish Shekeryk-Donykiv. Ultimately these Hutsul language publications were to help transform the Hutsuls into loyal citizens of a multiethnic Polish state while nonetheless allowing them to retain – even strengthen – their identity as Hutsuls. This respectful approach to the Hutsuls helps to justify the labeling of this episode a genuine “discovery.” 3 Mixed Speech in Language Contact between Chaos and Systematicity: The Case of Belorussian “Trasyanka” HENTSCHEL, GERD Department of Slavic Studies, University of Oldenburg (Germany) E-Mail:

Since the 1960s and ’70s at the latest, when massive (re)urbanization and industrialization in Belorussia was accompanied by large-scale rural-urban migration, a form of mixed Belorussian- Russian speech has emerged that is commonly known as “Trasyanka”. This is of course no well- defined “academic” category but a term that has been coined by non-linguists to refer contemptuously to forms of speech that deviate from both the Belorussian Standard Language (or dialects) and the Russian Standard Language, displaying traits (words, features, structures) from both languages. The scale of phenomena referred to by this expression is fairly large. Extreme “voices” might include on the one hand a Belorussian variant of Contemporary Standard Russian with mainly phonetic and/or phonological interferences by Belorussian and maybe minor morphologic and lexical ones, comparable to an Austrian or Swiss variants of Standard German. On the other hand it also refers to the contemporary “official” variant of Standard Belorussian, which goes back to a codification in the 1930s called “Narkamauka”. This variant is as a matter of fact much more convergent with Russian (and divergent from Polish) than a first, somewhat earlier codification called “Taraškevica”, to which Belorussians with a somewhat nationalist leaning adhere. Be that as it may, if the term is to be used in an academic context at all, it should be reserved to forms of speech that show large-scale “mixing” (in a broad sense) of Belorussian and Russian lexical and grammatical morphemes as well as of morphosyntactic or syntactic patterns. In fact, such a form of speech can be observed in a very large number of inhabitants of Belorussia. The proposed paper will outline the concepts of a first large-scale investigation currently being carried out in several areas of Belorussia. On the basis of a pilot study from one of these areas (the town of Baranavi y) it offers preliminary insights into paradigmatic and syntagmatic phenomena of this form of mixed speech. Some scholars from Belorussian underline the “chaotic” character of Trasyanka speech, its lack of systematicity (as do Ukrainian scholars for Ukrainian-Russian “Suržyk”). Without any doubt, Trasyanka speech is highly variative. But this degree of variation is also common, for example, in dialect contact or dialect mixing, where a considerable degree of stability – following Trudgill – emerges only with the third or fourth generation of speakers. Although working with a still rather small data base containing about 5.000 utterances (sentences) and some 25.000 (running) word forms, I will nevertheless try to outline initial tendencies of paradigmatic redistribution patterns in inflectional morphology and syntagmatic code-switching phenomena and comment on their “chaotic” or “systematic” nature. 4 Revolution and Self-Organization of Reality: Vertov and Eisenstein IAMPOLSKI, MIKHAIL Department of Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University (USA) E-Mail:

The Revolution is a moment of a general collapse of meaningful orders and hierarchies. Reality appear as a non organized chaos which, however, almost immediately acquires a new meaning, a new set of big Signifiers and Symbols. After Russian revolution of 1917 the cinema of Vertov and Eisenstein was, in my opinion, considered by its creators to be an utopian machine of self- organization of reality into meaningful order. Vertov tried to eliminate an artiste as somebody that imposes the preexistent schemes on reality and tried to replace him by a mechanical eye of neutral “kinok” that will register life according to thematic assignments. The recorded fragments of reality had to organize themselves on a basis of Bekhterev’s reflexology, of so called associative reflexes. This attempt reached to its climax in the “Man with the Movie Camera” where associations of fragments had to proceed without any participation of language, i.e. of concepts. Eisenstein started with similar premises in Proletkult where he played a significant role. Proletkult promoted the ideas of Alexandre Bogdanov who made a monistic self organization of life a key to its program. But quite soon Eisenstein moved away from the idea of self- organization. In the late 1920s he discovered the problematics of participation (via Lévy-Bruhl) that was a later elaboration of the platonic methexis. Methexis presumed the necessity of a permanent movement between the sensual, partial and conceptual, general. The idea of participation was disseminated in Russia by a symbolist Viacheslav Ivanov (very influential in Proletkult) and by some philosophers (including Bakhtin). The participation with its platonic component was directed against the purely monistic idea of the self-organization of reality without any relation to concepts. In my talk I will try to understand the reason of this shift from monism to Platonism in Eisenstein and his gradual abandonment of the utopia of a self- organization of reality. 5 The Prefix za- in Polish against the Slavic Backround: Between Ingressivity and Resultativity AZI SKI, MAREK Institute of Polish Language, University of Warsaw (Poland) E-Mail:

The paper presents the prefix za- in modern Polish against the background of other prefixes and other Slavic languages. Za- is highly productive in Russian and other East and South-East Slavic languages, but is usually considered to be scarcer in West Slavic ones. Aktionsart meanings added by this prefix to the main aspectual meaning can vary from a purely ingressive or inchoative one to adlative, prospective, anihilative, intensive and purely resultative meanings. The first meaning – ingressive – seems to be the basic and most frequent according to the aspectological tradition. The Polish za- is nowadays the second most frequent perfective prefix in purely aspectual pairs (it supports more than 18% of them), since many new derivates with za- have appeared or become stylistically neutral, losing their colloquial, ironic or pejorative connotation during the last 30 years. The data is reliable; it comes from the PWN-Oxford English- Polish Dictionary (2003), where all Polish prefixed perfectives have been counted which correspond together with their imperfective partners to English single verbs entries. Similar data is provided for Czech on the corpus basis by Esvan (2007) – the prefix za- is the second most frequent prefix in Czech. It makes us think about za- as one of the most important aspect markers, competing with z-/s-, which is commonly recognized as the basic aspectual prefix (or two prefixes) for the West Slavic languages.The paper analyses some new Polish perfective derivates with za-, eg. zabalowa ‘go partying/go out on the tiles’, zaeksperymentowa ‘try sth/experiment with sth’, ‘vote’, zaimpasowa ‘put sb. at an impasse’, zamataczy ‘mislead/deceive’, zaprocentowa ‘earn interest/pay off’, zawalczy ‘stand up/struggle for sth’ and zawetowa ‘exercise a veto’. The analysis stresses the factors of the accidentality of an action expressed by the prefixed verb, or its unexpected or unsatisfying results rather than pure ingressivity, resultativity or spatial meanings. The new dismissive function of za- can result from the meaning of doing sth on a trial basis, for a short time, without finishing – which was described as a marginal, derived connotation of the Russian za- by Voloxina and Popova (1993). Alternatively it can result from the so called negative meaning – a change from a normal to an abnormal state (described eg. by Janda 1986). In fact, this is the function of za- that seems to be acquiring significance in Polish now. 6 Recent Developments in Part-of-Speech Tagging in Czech OLIVA, KAREL Academy of Sciences, Institute of the Czech Language, Prague (Czech Republic) E-Mail:

Currently, part-of-speech tagging seems to be a well-known technology which has reached a level of technological maturity where neither substantially better results nor new ideas and applications can be expected. We shall show that this impression does not hold (at least) for languages with syntactic structure radically different from English, such as Slavic ones. In particular, we shall first show that still a considerable increase in quality of tagging can be achieved by using a sophisticated combination of conceptually different tagging methods, and then we shall demonstrate how one of these tagging methods can be used for building a functional and commercially successful grammar-checker. 7 Developing a Bilingual Dictionary: Principles and Implementation ŠIPKA, DANKO Department of Languages and Literatures, Arizona State University (USA) E-Mail:

The author uses the example of his unfolding project in Serbian-English bilingual lexicography to outline the principles of dictionary compilation based on meeting the users' needs. The project stipulates the following needs (stated in front of the ⇒ sign) and their corresponding lexicographic strategies. I. General needs (important to all users, not likely to be found elsewhere) A. Serbian speakers 1. Check the meaning of English lexical items ⇒ Provide the array of Serbian equivalents for each English entry word and, where possible, a general descriptive definition encompassing all these equivalents 2. Find the appropriate Serbian equivalent for each given sense of English entry words ( Provide explanations in Serbian as to the conditions when each English equivalent is used B. English speakers 1. Check the meaning of Serbian lexical items ( Provide the array of English equivalents for each Serbian entry word and, where possible, a general descriptive definition encompassing all these equivalents 2. Find the appropriate English equivalent for each given sense of Serbian entry words ( Provide explanations in English as to the conditions when each Serbian equivalent is used C. All users 1. Find as much information as possible 2. Find information as quickly as possible ( Achieve a compromise between comprehensiveness and accessibility ( Adapt the layout to the level of prospective users (lower level – less entries, more information about them) II. Special needs (important to some users, available elsewhere) A. Both Serbian and English speakers check their counterpart 1. Pronunciation ( Provide written transcription 2. Grammatical features of the entries (and their senses) ( Provide morphological and contrastive syntactic parameters 3. Combinatorial characteristics of the entries (and their senses) 8 ( Provide contrastive combinatorial features of the entries 4. Usage features of the entries (and their senses) ( Provide territorial, temporal, functional, and tenor labels 5. Lexical relations of the entries (and their senses) ( State antonyms, synonyms, derivatives, etc. The resulting dictionary microstructure, which prioritizes and emphasizes general users’ needs, can be exemplified as follows: rà n, -úna m field, result, or action of calculations: Œ(a) bill (trošak, naplata za komunalije, usluge), (b) receipt (potvrda naplate u radnji), (c) invoice (naplata za usluge), (d) check (naplata u restoranu); (e) kompjuterskom serveru), (f) statement (izv(j)eštaj u knjigovodstvu);  (a) ‚ arithmetic; mathematics (matematika); (b) calculus (integralni, diferencijalni, itd.); Ž  Œ (e) -~ checking account; t ~ duga ljubav lit. “clean account lasting love” = approx. neither borrower nor lender be (i.e. don't lend money to family and friends), (f) završni ~ annual statement,  (a) verižni ~ theory of series (mat.), Ž pomrsiti/pokvariti nekome ~e to spoil smb.’s plans; lit. “make out the bill without the tavernkeeper” = approx. take too much on oneself, do something that one has no authority to do.  be in one’s interest To mi ne ide u ~. That is not in my interest’; uraditi/ ~a to do smt. for one's own benefit; brak iz ~a marriage of convenience  voditi ra to take care of, (brinuti se o), consider (uzeti u obzir), keep tabs of (nadgledati)  Œ (a) ~ za struju electricity bill, (e) <> in an account: deposit (money etc.) in an account,  <> of convenience: marriage of convenience brak iz ljubavi love match, marriage for love Adj. rà n 9 Slavic Studies In The Age Of Transnationalism TIHANOV, GALIN Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures, University of Manchester (UK) E-Mail:

In this paper I trace the growth of a new research agenda that has been gaining momentum over the last two decades. I begin by clarifying the theoretical foundations of transnationalism and by an historical examination of how Slavic Studies related to the principles inscribed in this approach. Finding common elements in the cultures of the Slavic peoples is a trend dating back to the 16th century. But were the discourses of cross-border commonality and unity true antecedents of transnationalism? What were the benefits and constraints of the historically more recent but undoubtedly stronger nation-based research paradigms? Why were Slavic Studies relatively reluctant to subscribe to the new theoretical propositions adopted and employed by other fields? How is this indisposition being compensated for at present? These are some of the questions I seek to answer, as I place the evolution of Slavic Studies in the current context of globalisation and re-emerging cosmopolitanism. These reflections are followed by several case-studies of transnationalism drawn from the experience of border-crossing and exile in Central and Eastern Europe between the World Wars. My particular focus is on the polemics amongst Russian émigré literary critics in Paris of the 1920s-1930s, and on what I term the “East-East exilic experience”, i.e. the complex texture of events, actions, beliefs, mental dispositions, and attitudes exhibited during the long enforced stays of Left intellectuals from Eastern and Central Europe in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. I conclude this paper by situating the current field of Slavic Studies in a larger cluster of disciplines, where the humanities find themselves in an increasingly intensive dialogue with a number of relevant social sciences. 10 Patterns of Indirect Negative Evaluation: Russian Mass Media on Ukrainian Leaders A’BECKETT, LYUDMILLA Monash University (Australia) E-Mail:

The purpose of this paper is to overview patterns of provoking negative judgment in relation to Ukrainian public figures. The keywords ‘Yushchenko’, ‘Timoshenko’, ‘Orange/ revolution’ were used as a search tool for electronic versions of the Russian newspapers ‘Argumenty iI Fakty’ and ‘Komsomol’skaia pravda’ between October 2004 and June 2005. Approximately 100 articles of various genres were selected. The theoretical framework included Scott and Tribble (2006) on textual patterns recognition, Martin and White (2005) on appraisal theory and the graded salience hypothesis of Giora (2003). My major assumption was that the creation of negative images would not require direct accusations, abusive words and overtly negative statements. Subtle means of persuasion were used such as nicknames for the leaders ‘Hetman’, ‘Orange princess’, ‘Joan of Arc of Ukraine’, jokes, ironic comments, hyperbole and others. Frame shifting technique and unconfirmed allegations led to foregrounding of the topics ‘Yushchenko is an embodiment of the anti-Russian sentiments’, ‘Timoshenko – seductress and criminal’, ‘National treason’, ‘Narcis- sism and hypocrisy of the Orange leaders’. In terms of Giora (2003), condensing of the themes induced a salient disapproval of the Orange Revolution. In terms of Martin and White (2005), the Ukrainian leaders would get a positive evaluation on their ‘tenacity’ (how resolute they are) and ‘normality’ (how usual they are) which in turn overrides all positive assumptions on their ‘capacity’ (how capable they are), ‘veracity’ (how truthful they are) and ‘propriety’ (how ethical they are). Type-Theoretical Resource Grammar for Bulgarian ANGELOV, KRASIMIR Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg (Sweden) E-Mail:

We describe a type-theoretical resource grammar for Bulgarian in the Grammatical Framework (Ranta 2003). GF is a multilingual parsing and text generation framework. It already contains grammars for ten languages: one Slavic language (Russian), three Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Danish and Norwegian), three Romance languages (Italian, Spanish and French) and finaly English, German and Finish. We added the eleventh language – Bulgarian. Although this is not the first Slavic language in the GF family, it is the first South-Slavic one. Russian itself is an East-Slavic and differs significantly both in morphology and syntax. In GF the grammar has two levels: one abstract and one concrete (Ranta 2007). The abstract level is language independent and represents the original textual sentence as a typed lambda term (abstract syntax). There is only one abstract syntax which is shared by all GF grammars. The concrete level is language specific and gives the mapping from a lambda term to 11 its textual representation. The two levels separation allows sentences from one language to be translated to another or to generate simultaneously equivalent texts in multiple languages. Furthermore, the grammars in GF are divided into resource grammars and application grammars. The resource grammars have a wider coverage and are linguistically oriented but they can be ambiguous in many senses. The application grammars reuse the already existing resource grammars but specialize them in a specific context. In this way they are less ambiguous and usually they are extended with an application specific dictionary. The main purpose of GF is the development of controlled languages for dialog systems where the users may have different native languages. Another use of GF is the multilingual text authoring where the text usually represents the complex output of some kind of computation. In our work we develop formalized grammar rules for Bulgarian and we show how the language specifics fit into this multilingual setting. The grammar that we developed is a resource grammar. On top of it the end user could create an application specific grammar with very limited linguistic knowledge. The user could start with an English grammar that could be translated to Bulgarian just by introduction of new lexicon since the abstract syntax representation is common for all languages. The grammar has a complete morphology for adjectives, nouns, verbs, numerals and pronouns (Krustev 1984). There is a small parallel dictionary with 350 words that exist in all languages and another dictionary of 57.805 words that exist only of Bulgarian nouns, verbs and adjectives. The structural rules cover the most common constructions for the noun, adjective and verb phrases. There are declarative, interrogative and imperative sentences with positive and negative polarity. The verb phrases can be in a six different tenses or in the conditional mood. In a separated module some idioms that are expressed in different ways in different languages are defined for Bulgarian as well. References: Krustev, B. (1984): The Bulgarian Morphology in 187 Type Tables. Sofija. Ranta, A. (2003): Grammatical Framework. A Type-Theoretical Grammar Formalism. In: Journal of Functional Programming 14, 145-189. Ranta, A. (2007): Modular Grammar Engineering in GF. In: Research on Language and Computation 5, 133-158. Characteristics of the Russian verbal system of bilingual Russian-German children ANSTATT, TANJA Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany) E-Mail:

The Russian and the German verbal systems exhibit obvious differences; the largest difference emerges in the category of aspect, which is grammatical in Russian, but not in German. A further difference consists in a subcategory of verbs, the so-called verbs of motion in Russian, which have semantic, aspectual and morphological features. The thesis can be put forth that the acquisition of these categories is more problematic in bilingual than in monolingual language acquisition, since bilingual children receive less linguistic input in Russian than monolinguals do. Further, it is to be expected that bilingual children demonstrate larger differences among 12 themselves than monolingual children do, because more variables (at what age they immigrated or if they were born in Germany, the extent of input from their parents, etc.) play a role. In the present study the ways in which mono- and bilingual children between 4 and 10 years use aspect and verbs of motion in Russian are analyzed and compared on the basis of an extensive corpus (over 80.000 word forms). The corpus includes transcripts of recordings from a total of 35 bilingual and 20 monolingual children; per child there are 1.500 tokens on average. The data were gathered specifically with regard to questions of aspect. They include for each child the re- telling of a picture story, an online-description of a trick film as well as the re-telling of this film, a conversation with expressions regarding past and future experiences and explanations of game rules. Based on these data the following questions should be analyzed: 1. Do more deviations in the aspect choice (aspect errors) arise among the bilingual children than among the monolingual ones? 2. How do the deviations in both groups look, and are there differences between them in the type of aspect errors? 3. Do more deviations for the verbs of motion arise among the bilingual children than among the monolingual ones? If so, what do they consist of? 4. Do the same deviations arise among bilingual older children as among young monolinguals or are there qualitative differences? 5. What do the results reveal about the process of acquiring aspect category and verbs of motion? The answers to these questions should finally be connected with the language biography of bilingual children: 6. Under which conditions do no or few differences from monolingual children appear, and under which conditions are there more differences? Accusative Case in Slavic PPs A , BOBAN and GEHRKE, BERIT University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) / Pompeu Fabra University Barcelona (Spain) E-Mails:

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In most Slavic languages a number of prepositions with spatial meanings take nominal complements in two different cases: an inherent case (e.g. locative, or instrumental), as in (1a), and accusative (1b). Traditional grammar generalizes that the accusative is assigned in the context of a change of state, most frequently of location, in which the relevant PP denotes the result state of this change. Locative, or other cases, are assigned to PPs that modify the entire event (structurally represented as the VP), usually for place. In more formal terms, accusative is linked to the denotation of the goal, or in a decompositional approach to event semantics – of the predicate of the result subevent. Interesting generalizations can be made in this respect: 1) the accusative case is assigned irrespective of the preposition, but directly depending on the denotation of the verb, and the relation it establishes to the PP; 2) the accusative case can be assigned to a nominal expression appearing as the complement of a preposition only if the eventuality also involves an entity undergoing a change (in position in this case), which is generally the VP-internal argument; and 3) PPs taking a nominal complement in the accusative always denote a secondary resultative predicate of the VP-internal argument undergoing a change of location, which is then simultaneously the subject of the secondary predicate and for which the default case is also accusative. 13 We propose the following account: We argue that the nominative-finiteness complex of the TP domain has a parallel in the domain of the result subevent of telic eventualities: the subject of the result subevent (the undergoer of change) and the predicate of the result subevent agree, and this agreement is overtly marked in Slavic languages by the accusative case, the default case of the undergoer. Accusative is first assigned to the undergoer, by a telic verb (or the syntactic structure it projects), and then the resultative predicate receives the same case as the marking of the resultative predication in the result subevent1. An interesting case in support of our view is when in a telic eventuality, a PP denotes a secondary predicate of the direct object, but where the direct object does not express the undergoer, and consequently the secondary predicate does not denote the result predicate. Such is the case in (2), where Marija is in the hospital before, during and after the eventuality and all that changes is Jovan’s location: he moves from in the hospital to out of it. The case assigned to the nominal complement of the PP involved is locative, as predicted by our analysis. A potential objection to the proposed analysis is that often telic eventualities are described without an overt constituent lexicalizing the result predicate, as in (3a). We argue that accusative is always first assigned to the undergoer, as the default case marking this role, and only then by agreement also to the complement of the preposition in resultative PPs. Hence, this does not present a problem for our analysis: when the resultative predicate is not overtly specified, it has fully incorporated into the verb, and accusative surfaces only on the undergoer. Another objection could be that there are cases where the same participant is both the agent and the undergoer, as in (3b). This is only a problem for our analysis in as much as it is a problem for any analysis that accounts for the particular V-PP combinations in terms of secondary resultative predication (unlike, for instance, Rothstein 2004), and there are ways to overcome the issue which is orthogonal to the kind of account proposed here (Neeleman & van de Koot 2002, e.g., do not assume event decomposition but still analyze such VPP combinations on a par with resultatives). Our analysis gives a neat formal account of the well-known property of Slavic PPs that could be carried over to variable case assignment in PPs in other Indo- European languages, for instance German (see Abraham 2003, Zwarts 2005). It also opens new directions for analyzing case assignment in general and the nature of structural as well as inherent cases. (1) a. Elena položila knigu na sumku. (Russian) Elena put book.Acc on bag.Acc ‘Elena put a (the) book on the bag.’ b. Elena itala knigu na avtobuse. Elena read book.Acc on bus.Loc ‘Elena read a book on the bus.’ (2) a. Jovan ostavio Mariju u bolnici. (Serbo-Croatian) Jovan left Marija.Acc in hospital.Loc ‘Jovan left Marija in the hospital.’ 1 In the case of unaccusatives, we assume that in a hierarchy of case, which is independently needed to account for accusative case overriding the locative or other cases that otherwise appear with these Ps, nominative case overrides accusative case when the internal argument DP has to raise to subject position to satisfy EPP. 14 b. Marija je ofarbala sobe (u) plavo. Marija Aux painted room.F.Pl.Acc in blue.N.Sg.Acc ‘Marija painted the room blue. (3) a. Jovan je slomio vazu. (Serbo-Croatian) Jovan Aux broken vase.Acc ‘Jovan broke the/a vase.’ b. Jovan otišao u bolnicu. Jovan went in hospital.Acc ‘Jovan went to the hospital.’ References: Abraham, W. (2003): The myth of doubly governing prepositions in German. In: Shay, E., Seibert, U. (eds.): Motion, Direction and Location in Languages: In Honor of Zygmunt Frajzyngier. Amsterdam, 19-38. Neeleman, A., van de Koot, H. (2002): Bare resultatives. In: Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 6, 1-52. Rothstein, S. (2004): Structuring Events: A Study in the Semantics of Lexical Aspect. Oxford. Zwart, J.-W. (to appear): Structural case and dependency marking: A neo-Jakobsonian view. In: CLS 42 Panels Volume. Zwarts, J. (2005): Prepositional aspect and the algebra of paths. In: Linguistics and Philosophy 28/6, 739-779. Construction of a Russian WordNet Grid BALKOVA, VALENTINA3 and YABLONSKY, SERGEY1,2,3 1 Graduate School of Management, St. Petersburg State University (Russia) 2 Petersburg Transport University, St. Petersburg (Russia) 3 Russicon Company, St. Petersburg (Russia) E-Mails:

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Computational lexicons (CL) provide machine understandable word knowledge. Semi-automatic integration and enrichment of large-scale multilingual lexicons like WordNet (cf. Fellbaum 1998) is used in many computer applications. The three core concepts in WordNet are the synset, the word sense and the word. Words are the basic lexical units, while a sense is a specific sense in which a specific word is used. Synsets group word senses with a synonymous meaning, such as {car, auto, automobile, machine, motorcar} or {car, railcar, railway car, railroad car}. There are four disjoint types of synset, containing exclusively nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs. There is one specific type of adjective, namely an adjective satellite. Furthermore, WordNet defines seventeen relations, of which • ten between synsets (hyponymy, entailment, similarity, member meronymy, substance meronymy, part meronymy, classification, cause, verb grouping, attribute); • five between word senses (derivational relatedness, antonymy, see also, participle, pertains to); • “gloss” (between a synset and a sentence); • “frame” (between a synset and a verb construction pattern). 15 Linking concepts across many lexicons belonging to the WordNet-family started by using the Interlingual Index (ILI) (cf. Vossen 1998). Unfortunately, no version of the ILI can be considered a standard one and often the various lexicons exploit different version of WordNet as ILI. At the 3rd GWA Conference in Korea the idea was launched to start building a WordNet grid around a Common Base Concepts expressed in terms of WordNet synsets and SUMO definitions (http://www.globalwordnet.org/gwa/gwa_grid.htm). This first version of the Grid was planned to be build around the set of 4689 Common Base Concepts. Since then only three languages with essentially various numbers of synsets and different WordNet versions were placed in the Grid mappings (English – 4689 synsets with WN 2.0 mapping, Spanish – 15556 synsets with WN1.6 mapping and Catalan – 12942 synsets with WN1.6 mapping). But there is yet no official format for the Global WordNet Grid. So far there are just only three files in the specified format. As alternative another possible solution can use the DTD from the Arabic WordNet: http://www.globalwordnet.org/AWN/DataSpec.html. This paper reports about the result of the development of the Russian WordNet Grid (see Balkova, Suhonogov, Yablonsky 2004). It describes the usage of Russian and English-Russian lexical language resources and software to process WordNet Grid for the Russian language (4600 synsets with WN 2.0 mapping) and the design of a XML/RDF/OWL-markup of the grid resources. Relevant aspects of the DTD/XML/RDF/OWL formats and related technologies are surveyed. Several Russian lexical resources were used for the Russian WordNet Grid (Balkova, Suhonogov, Yablonsky 2008). We have done porting of the original English and Russian WordNet into XML using the DTD for the XML structure from http://www.globalwordnet.org/ gwa/gwa_grid.htm and the DTD from the Arabic Wordnet: http://www.globalwordnet.org/ AWN/DataSpec.html. The standard DTD for the Russian grid XML structure and the English/Russian XML format for the Grid were developed. The grid of English and Russian local WordNets is realized as a virtual repository of XML databases accessible through web services. Basic services were devoted to the management of the actual versions of Princeton and Russian WordNets. Unfortunately, no version of the grid can be considered a standard because the various grids exploit different versions of WordNet, have different numbers of entries and there is no mapping of the multilingual grids on new versions of WordNet. We have done porting of the original English and Russian WordNet Grid into RDF and OWL (Balkova, Suhonogov, Yablonsky 2008). References: Balkova, V., Suhonogov, A., Yablonsky, S.A. (2004): Russia WordNet. From UML-notation to Internet / Intranet Database Implementation. In: Proceedings of the Second International WordNet Conference (GWC 2004). Brno, 31-38. Balkova, V., Suhonogov, A., Yablonsky, S.A. (2008): Some Issues in the Construction of a Russian WordNet Grid. In: Proceedings of the Forth International WordNet Conference (GWC 2008). Szeged, 44-55. Fellbaum, C. (ed.) (1998): WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database. Cambridge. Vossen, P. (1998): EuroWordNet: A Multilingual Database with Lexical Semantic Network. Dordrecht. 16 Representativity in the Czech National Corpus and Acceptability Judgments BERMEL, NEIL University of Sheffield (UK) E-Mail:

Two components of the Czech National Corpus (the 100-million-word SYN2000 and SYN2005) are said to be “representatively constructed” (Králík 2001, Šulc 2001). In this particular instance, “representativity” means that their composition reflects research conducted into the sort of texts Czechs read, publish and have at their disposal. What use does representativity have for corpus- based linguistics? On one account, the frequency and distribution of items in a representatively constructed corpus should be more or less similar to the frequency with which items are seen in standard written texts and their distribution among texts, and thus should bear a close relation to normative judgments about these forms – if normative judgments correlate at all to the input that the average native user of a language receives on a daily basis. On another account, the link between representativity and acceptability must be rejected, as multiple other factors not linked to the frequency or distribution of a form’s occurrence are said to play a more decisive role in shaping aesthetic judgments, and the quality of data found in corpora is seen to cast doubts on its general relevance (see Oliva and Doležalová 2004 for a sceptical view of the uses of corpus data). To test the relevance of corpus data to acceptability judgments, I have undertaken a pilot study, subjecting examples of variation in Czech genitive singular forms (from the so-called hrad paradigm) to acceptability tests. Twenty native speakers’ responses were obtained for stimuli incorporating a variety of words, endings, and contexts. Judgments were pinned to a seven-point Likert scale. Standard precautions were taken to ensure that informants were making full use of the scale, to reduce the possibility of fatigue, to encourage informants to rely on instinct in formulating their judgments, and to eliminate adjacency effects, lexical effects, contextual effects and ordering effects. Difficulties presented by the selection of examples and the judgments obtained about them can also be mentioned (see Schütze 1996 on the pitfalls of acceptability studies). The results of this pilot study suggest that while overall there are strong correlations between corpus data and acceptability judgments as to what is most acceptable and what is unacceptable, corpus data do not correlate to degrees of acceptability with any precision. (Similar results have been suggested by studies of acceptability and corpora with regards to syntax, inter alia Halliday 1991a, 1991b, 1992 on relative frequency and information theory, Divjak (forthcoming) on aspect in constructions with finite verbs plus infinitives, and Kempen and Harbusch (2005) on “production thresholds” in German word order.) The practical implication of this analysis is that corpora have an important but limited role in descriptive work on languages, with some data giving key support to native-speaker intuitions, while other data seem to have only minimal relation to these intuitions. References: Divjak, D. (forthcoming): On (in)frequency and (un)acceptability. In: Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B. (ed.): Corpus Linguistics, Computer Tools and Applications – State of the Art. Frankfurt am Main. Halliday, M.A.K. (1991a): Corpus studies and probabilistic grammar. In: Aijmer, K., Altenberg, B. (ed.): English Corpus Linguistics. New York, London, 30-43. Halliday, M.A.K. (1991b): Towards probabilistic interpretations. In: Ventola, E. (ed.): Functional and Systemic Linguistics: Approaches and Uses. Berlin, New York, 39-61. Halliday, M.A.K. (1992): Language as system and language as instance. In: Svartvig, J. (ed.): The Corpus as a Theoretical Construct: Directions in Corpus Linguistics. Berlin, New York, 61-77. 17 Kempen, G., Harbusch, K. (2005): The relationship between grammaticality ratings and corpus frequencies: A case study into word order variability in the midfield of German clauses. In: Kepser, S., Reis, M. (eds.): Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical and Computational Perspectives. Berlin, New York, 329-349. In: Slovo a slovesnost 62, 38-53. Oliva, K., Doležalová, D. (2004): O korpusu jako o zdroji jazykových dat. In: Karlík, P. (ed.): Korpus jako zdroj dat Brno, 7-10. Schütze, C. (1996): The Empirical Base of Linguistics: Grammaticality Judgments and Linguistic Methodology. Chicago. Šulc, M. (2001): Tematická reprezent In: Slovo a slovesnost 62, 53-61. Russian tam: A Discursive and Hypothetical Marker? BOCALE, PAOLA University of Rome 'La Sapienza' (Italy) E-Mail:

In analyzing the use of tam in corpora of spoken Russian it can be noted that the main function of tam as an adverb of place used to signal a distant element is often overshadowed by its use as a discursive marker. Discourse is often saturated with tam as if speakers want listeners to follow them in their mental reconstructions step by step: (1) tam trubku vzjal / nerovno / on tam tam Tam can reinforce the indefiniteness of the sentence: (2) -to tam Another function of tam which is typical of spoken language is that of a hypothetical marker in sentences where the use of a distancing element underlines the abstractness of the situation: (3) / prosto bez slov tam / ili tam iz slova „Love you” i ono mejaet tam (4) Ustroj mne fotosessiju / Ol’ tam chotja by vyložit’ / vot tam vykladyvajut kogda / smotrju tam tam nravjatsja fotki / krasivo The analysis of data from conversational discourse seems therefore to suggest that the deictic value of tam is changing toward more discursive and perhaps grammatical functions. 18 Variation in Verb Case Government in the Speech of Polish-German Bilinguals BREHMER, BERNHARD University of Hamburg (Germany) E-Mail:

The investigation of transfers from one language to the other by bilingual persons has often concentrated on cases of lexical borrowing. However, contact-induced changes or variation can be observed in other areas as well, e.g., on the morphosyntactic or syntactic level. My paper examines the use of verb-argument structures in the speech of bilingual persons who have acquired Polish as their first language (L1) or were raised bilingually (2L1), but are now living in a German-speaking environment. In their speech, numerous deviations from the morphosyntactic rules of contemporary standard Polish can be observed, e.g.: szukam ten adres; mój tata uwielbia , za Niemcami; z rodzicami. Therefore my talk addresses questions like: Can the observed deviations be attributed to the influence of German as the dominant language of the environment (and often nowadays the dominant language of the informants, too), are they simply results of a deactualization of Polish (= due to insufficient access to Polish), or do they reflect certain tendencies of simplification which are caused by other factors (e.g., a tendency towards analytical expressions, which has been attested to also for Polish speakers in their homeland)? To what extent do they occur regularly in the data, i.e. are they characterized by a certain degree of systematicity, or do they occur only as instances of idiolectal variation in the data? Which classes of verbs are affected by these variations, and is there some sort of hierarchy as far as the affected verb classes are concerned? Do the semantic and syntactic properties of the governed nouns also play a role in this process? Do markedness conditions account for triggering these deviations? Therefore the current paper tries to shed some new light on processes of language attrition by trying to separate different factors which are often not distinguished in studies on bilingualism and language attrition. Furthermore, it not only adopts an “error perspective”, but includes a “total performance perspective”, which means that not only deviations from the target structures will be examined, but also the correct production of structures of the target language. Transcripts of interviews with 50 Polish-German bilinguals who have moved to Germany at an early age or who have already been born in Germany form the empirical base of my investigation. The data is comprised of biographical interviews, as well as short spontaneous narratives and descriptions of a picture story. Formation of Resultative Adjectives in Polish and Analogical Levelling CETNAROWSKA, B University of Silesia, Sosnowiec (Poland) E-Mail:

The present paper investigates diachronic changes and the present-day variability in the form of Polish resultative adjectives. It is argued that the replacement of some obsolete resultative 19 adjectives by rival forms, or the occurrence of adjectival doublets, can be attributed both to the changes in the restrictions on the attachment of adjectivizing (or stem-forming) suffixes and to the phenomenon of analogical leveling (as defined in Joseph 1998). Two types of Polish resultative adjectives, which denote a state implying a previous event, are discussed here: a) those terminating in the sequence - , e.g. ‘rotten’, ‘mouldy’; b) those terminating in the sequence -ny or -ty, e.g. ‘frozen’, ‘tired’. From the diachronic point of view, many of them are adjectivized participles (Bartnicka 1970). The resultative adjectives of the first type are based on stems of the past participle (i.e. - - stems). The adjectives of the second type are based on the stems of the passive participle, which contains the morpheme -n- or its variant -t-. A drastic decrease has been observed in the use of adjectival past participles since the 19th century (cf. Bajerowa 2003), as is indicated by some obsolete words of this type given in (1). At present, resultative adjectives terminating in - are productively formed from prefixed verbs denoting change of state, mainly from verbs containing the thematic suffix -e(j)- and - - (exemplified in 2). Verbs with the suffix - - can be divided into several subgroups, depending on the morphological shape of their past tense forms (cf. Laskowski 1998). The suffix - - surfaces either in all past tense forms of a given verb (as shown in 3), in none of them (in 4) or in some of them (see 5-6). The infinitive, the imperative and the present/future tense forms are fairly regularly based on the extended verb stems (which contain the - - morpheme). The existence of such slightly distinct models of verb conjugation contributes to the appearance of nonstandard verb forms, such as those in (7). A relatedness is postulated in this paper between the instability of the conjugation paradigm of - - verbs and the occurrence of doublets in adjectival derivation, i.e. pairs of resultative adjectives terminating either in - or -ty (exemplified in 8-9). The form terminating in -ty is the more recent one. It may still be perceived as non-established or colloquial (as in 8). Alternatively, it may be gradually replacing the earlier - adjective, which starts to be perceived as rare or as having a poetic flavour (see 9). Resultative - - adjectives exhibit the shortened form of the verb stem, while the -t- adjectives are based on the extended stem. Thus, the derivation of rival adjectives in -ty can be interpreted as resulting from the pressure towards the preservation of the - - suffix and, consequently, towards the consistency of the stem form within conjugational and derivational paradigms. (1) (obs.) ‘failed’ (cf. nieudany ‘failed’, from ‘to fail’) (obs.) ‘burst’ (cf. ‘burst’ from ‘to burst’) (2) ‘speechless’ (from ‘to become speechless’) ‘that has become yellow’ (from ‘to become slightly yellow’) (3) ‘shoutINF’ (4) ‘growINF’ krzyknij ‘shoutIMPER’ ‘growIMPER’ ‘shoutFUT.1SG’ ‘growPRES.1SG’ ‘shoutPAST.M.1SG’ ‘growPAST.M.1SG’ ‘shoutPAST.M.3SG’ ‘growPAST.M.3SG’ ‘shoutPAST.F.3SG’ ‘growPAST.F.3SG’ (5) ‘grow-thinINF’ wychudnij ‘grow-thin IMPER’ 20 ‘grow-thinFUT.1SG’ ‘grow-thinPAST.M.1SG’ or ‘grow-thinPAST.M.3SG’ ‘grow-thinPAST.F.3SG’ (6) ‘freezeINF’ ‘freezePAST.F.3SG’ ‘freezeIMPER’ ‘freezeFUT.1SG’ or ‘freezePAST.M.1SG’ , or ‘freezePAST.M.3SG’ (7) (nonstandard) ‘grow-thinPAST.F.3SG’ (cf. in 4) ?* (nonstandard) ‘freezePAST.F.3SG’ (cf. in 6) (8) or (nonstandard) ‘that has grown weak’ (from ‘to grow weak’) or (rare, colloq.) ‘pale’ (from ‘to become pale’) or ?* (nonstandard) ‘thinned’ (from ‘to grow thin’) y or (rare, colloq.) ‘withered’ (from ‘to wither’) (9) or or References: Bajerowa, I. (1992): (vol. II. Fleksja). Katowice. Bartnicka. B. (1970): . Warszawa. Joseph, B.D. (1998): Diachronic morphology. In: Spencer, A., Zwicky, A.M. (eds.): The Handbook of Morphology. Oxford, 351-373. Laskowski, R. (21998): Paradygmatyka. In: Grzegorczykowa, R., Laskowski, R., Wróbel, H. (eds.): Gramatyka . Warszawa, 225-269. The Verb’s Semantics and its Compatibility with Temporal Adverbials in Polish CETNAROWSKA, B and STAWNICKA, JADWIGA University of Silesia, Sosnowiec (Poland) E-Mails:

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The aim of the present paper is to assess the degree of correlation between the semantic properties of Polish verbs and their compatibility with temporal adverbials. We will also examine the role of temporal adverbials in the aspectual intepretation of Polish sentences. The semantic classification of Polish verbs adopted in the paper is based on the verb typology proposed in Laskowski (1996, 1998). Reference will frequently be made to the aspectual classification of English predicates outlined in Vendler (1967). Polish temporal adverbials will be divided into several semantic types (cf. Grzegorczykowa 1975, Laskowski 21 1998, 2003, 2005), including adverbial expressions of duration (godzin przez godzin ‘for an hour’), completive (i.e. time-span) adverbials (w ci gu dwóch lat ‘within two years’, w dwie godziny ‘in two hours’) as well as adverbials denoting duration of the result state (na dwie godziny ‘for two hours’). For each type (and subtype) of the temporal adverbials, its cooccurrence with verbs of a given semantic class will be examined (see examples in 1-4). The analysis will be carried out separately for perfective and imperfective verbs (cf. 3 and 4). It will be shown that when discussing the compatibility of Polish temporal adverbials with a verb predicate, we cannot focus only on the general type of the event denoted by the predicate (i.e. its aspectual class or Aktionsart), as in Vendler’s classification. It is often indispensible to take into account fine-grained details of the verb’s semantics, such as the controllability and directionality of the eventuality denoted by the verb or the possibility of setting a temporal limit to the result state. This is exemplified in (5) and (6) for the result state (RS) adverbials occurring with verbs of destruction and construction. Moreover, the compatibility of verb classes with a particular temporal adverbial is determined both by the general type of the adverbial (i.e. durative, completive or result-state one) and by the length of the time span denoted by it (see 7). Ambiguity will be exemplified (as in 8 and 9), concerning the aspectual interpretation of sentences containing imperfective verb forms and durative adverbials (przez kilka godzin ‘for a few hours’). Sentences (8) and (9), for instance, are ambiguous as to whether the aim of the action has been reached or not. It will be indicated (as in 10 and 11) that the semantic interpretation of some temporal expressions in Polish may change, depending on the semantic class of the main verb and on its grammatical (perfective or imperfective) aspect. (1) ‘Peter slept-impf. an hour/for an hour/*for an hour (RS)/ *in an hour.’ (2) ‘I talked-impf. to him an hour/ for an hour/ *for an hour (RS)/ *in an hour.’ (3) ‘I put-pf. (the) documents in order *an hour/ for an hour/ for an hour (RS)/ in an hour.’ (4) ‘I put-impf. (the) documents in order an hour/ for an hour/ *for an hour (RS)/ *in an hour.’ (5) ‘The city was destroyed-pf. by (the) invaders for several years (RS).’ (6) ni. ‘He drew-pf. up a contract for a few days (RS).’ (7) ‘Peter for two hours/*several hours rose-impf. from (the) chair.’ (8) ‘I put-impf. (the) documents in order (for) a few hours.’ 22 (9) ‘For a long time I gave-impf. you this book.’ (10) ‘He built-pf. (a) house in three years.’ (11) ‘He found-pf. (the) key in ten minutes.’ References Grzegorczykowa, R. (1975): , Warszawa, Kraków. Laskowski, R. (1996): Aspekt a znaczenie czasowników (predykaty zmiany stanu). In: Rymut, K., T., Bobrowski, I. (eds.): Studia z leksykologii i gramatyki j zyków skich. Kraków, 40-48. Laskowski, R. (1998): Grzegorczykowa, R., Laskowski, R., Wróbel, H. (eds.): zyka polskiego. Morfologia. Warszawa, 169-171. Laskowski, R. (2003): Präpositionale Ausdrücke mit temporaler Funktion im Polnischen. In: Hentschel, G., Menzel, Th. (eds.): Präpositionen im Polnischen. Oldenburg, 193-226. Laskowski, R. (2005): Temporalne frazy przyimkowe o funkcji prospektywnej i retrospektywnej. In: Grochowski, M. (ed.): Przys semantyki j zyka polskiego. , 209-225. Vendler, Z. (1967): Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca. Code-Mixing among Bilingual Russian-German Children and Adults. (Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Studies) DIESER, ELENA Ruhr University Bochum (Germany) E-Mail:

In a conversation between two bilingual people, who have a command of the same two languages, code-mixing is a common phenomenon, and has been studied and described by many researchers (cf. Grosejan 2001, Tracy 2000 etc.). Particularly in recent years several studies on Russian-German code-mixing have appeared (see e.g. Meng 2001, Meng/Protassova 2005), although they mainly deal with the speech of adult bilinguals or with school children. There are only a few articles regarding Russian-German code-mixing among younger children at an early phase of language acqisition (Anstatt/Dieser 2007 and Dieser 2007). These articles focus less on the phenomenon of code-mixing and more on quantitative relationships between monolingual language production and code-mixing. The goal of the present study is to investigate: (a) how code-mixing functions (and in particular word-internal code-mixing) among young bilingual Russian-German speaking children at the very beginning of language production; (b) whether there are already in this phase certain regularities, whereby morphemes (or phonemes) of Russian and of German are put together to form one mixed word; (c) if so, whether these regularities are different from those that are characteristic of the word-internal code-mixing of bilingual Russian-German preschool children and adults (Meng 2001, Brehmer 2007); (d) to what extent the code-mixing of children is influenced by the code-mixing in the input the children are given. 23 The data basis constitutes: (1) Longitudinal studies of a bilingual Russian-German speaking boy (aged 1;0 to 7;0), whose input hardly contains code-mixing; (2) A cross-sectional study of recordings of Russian-German speaking children (30) at ages between 3 and 10 years and bilingual Russian-German speaking adults (10); some of the children display a high percentage of code-mixing, especially for the matrix language Russian. The results of this investigation show that for the most part the same systematic is foundational for the code-mixing of young bilingual Russian-German children as that of older children and adults. This can be seen in the asymetrical relationship; in code-mixing one of the two languages provides the analytical (article etc.) and synthetic (flexion etc.) functional elements. This language can then be considered the matrix language (cf. Myers-Scotton 1993, Schmitt 2000). On the other hand, most of the elements that convey meaning come from the other language. Further, an individual’s matrix language can change in the course of time. For the child observed over a long time period, the main matrix language for (word-internal) code-mixing was German between the ages of 2;5 and 2;8 and Russian between the ages of 2;9 and 3;1. The code- mixing phenomena show that the child already conducts a cross-linguistic word type analysis at the age of two years and completes a morphological adaptation that does not stem directly from the input. This conclusion is discussed in the framework of functional-connectional (Elsen 1999 u.a.) and of generative approaches. The Aspect of Verbs of Motion in Russian and Czech DÜBBERS, VALENTIN Eberhard Karls University Tübingen (Germany) E-Mail:

The subject of my paper is the close but complex synchronic relationship between the dichotomy “determinate vs. indeterminate” (DET/IDT) of verbs of motion and the grammatical dichotomy of perfective (pfv) vs. imperfective (ipfv) aspect in Russian (Ru) and Czech (Cz). The underlying hypothesis is the theoretical claim that although the dichotomy of verbs of motion is basically a lexico-semantic category, in certain contexts such as iteration, negation, or disapproval of a directed movement towards a goal the IDT verb has to be described as a functional ipfv aspectual counterpart to the corresponding pfv DET verb, consider in Cz . (“He/She is in the habit of going home late.”), in Ru , or in Cz even (“Why did you bring me this?”). The notion that the use of the IDT verb is motivated by the implication of the return path is only partially true (especially for the bidirectional function of Ru IDT verbs as in the sentence which has no equivalent in Cz) and it does not hold for the above cases of iterated, negated, or disapproved one-way movements. I want to base this theoretical interpretation on the theory of functional aspectual pair relations proposed by Lehmann (cf. Lehmann 1999 and Anstatt 2003), which distinguishes between primary (alpha) and secondary (beta) partners and allows multiple aspectual relations with more than one beta partner. It is true that the above-mentioned function of the IDT verb as an aspectual counterpart to the pfv DET verb is limited in that it cannot have the reading of an actual process of a directed movement. But Ru prixodit' as an ipfv beta-verb to pfv prijti, for instance, has a similar 24 functional limitation as xodit' functioning as a beta-verb to pojti: in both cases, the beta-verb for the actual process function is idti. Of course, in the general-factual reading and in the historical and the reporting present xodit' cannot denote a non-iterated one-way move-ment, unlike prichodit', which shows that IDT verbs still have a somewhat peripheral status as functional aspectual partners. Then again, contexts of iteration, negation, or disapproval of a directed movement do not always require an IDT verb. For example, under certain conditions such as focussing one direction of an iterated bidirectional movement the ipfv DET verb, too, can have the iterative function, as in the Ru sentence . Often, there is competition between the DET and the IDT verb depending on pragmatic factors, or the syntax allows only one verb, and native speakers do not always agree among themselves or with claims made in literature. This competition between DET and IDT verbs in the two languages will be another topic of my paper, illustrated contrastively for Ru and Cz and mainly by corpus and Internet data. Finally, the behavior of verbs of motion in the two languages has to be explained against the background of the aspect systems in general. This is why I will outline the main differences between Ru and Cz aspect, the latter not being as well-known and well-investigated as the former. One crucial difference is the general possibility in Cz to use the pfv aspect in iterative contexts. Furthermore, the aspectual behavior of both DET and IDT verbs themselves has to be taken into account. In this regard, it is important to note that Cz DET verbs (at least the intransitive ones) lack a neutral perfectivizing prefix corresponding to Ru po- in pojti. Rather, the unprefixed form is functionally biaspectual and can naturally occur in pfv contexts, consider Otec = Ru Otec uže pošël domoj. (By contrast, the prefix po- is the temporal marker for the future tense with the resulting forms being biaspectual aswell.) With this in mind, it becomes clear that Cz unprefixed DET verbs used in iterative contexts represent an instance of aspectual neutralization, for they could be interpreted either as being ipfv (in the iterative aspectual function) or as pfv according to the general conditions for pfv verbs referring to iterated events. Thus, the clear-cut intermediate position of Ru ipv DET verbs is absent in Cz, with the pure DET vs. IDT opposition moving towards the opposition of aspect even more. References: Adamec, P. (1999): Vi Hasil, J. (ed.): . Praha. Anstatt, T. (2003): Aspekt, Argumente und Verbklassen im Russischen. Unpublished postdoctoral lecture qualification thesis, Tübingen. Dickey, S.M. (2000): Parameters of Slavic Aspect. A Cognitive Approach. Stanford, CA. Eckert, E. (1984): A Contrastive Study of Czech and Russian Aspect. Ann Arbour. Forsyth, J. (1970): A Grammar of Aspect. Usage and Meaning in the Russian Verb. London. Kope , F. (1962): . Praha. K , H. 6, 32-39. Lehmann, V. (1999): Der russische Aspekt. In: Jachnow, H. (ed.): Handbuch der sprachwissenschaftlichen Russistik und ihrer Grenzdisziplinen. Wiesbaden, 214-242. 4 Murawjowa, L.S. ( 1990): Die Verben der Bewegung im Russischen. Moskau. 25 Where Are the Limits Of Historical Core Vocabulary of East Slavonic Languages? GALUTSKIKH, IRYNA Zaporozhye National University (Ukraine) E-Mail:

Core vocabulary is investigated within numerous paradigms, such as communicative, systemic, structural, evolutionary, semantic etc. (Carter, Hughes, Ogden, Quirk, Stein, Stubbs, Vinogradov) using the data of various languages. In this research the criterion of chronological stability is applied and core vocabulary is treated as the corpus of lexemes that have been part of language since the earliest stages of its evolution. Our previous research of historical core vocabulary of two closely related languages of the Germanic group – English and German – sustained the idea that inner mechanisms of lexicon evolution are encoded in the lexicon’s historical core being shaped by its functional characteristics which stimulate the evolutionary processes taking place in it (Galutskikh 2007, Skybina/Galutskikh 2007). I suppose that this status of core vocabulary has a universal character and this research is the attempt to examine the core vocabulary of East Slavonic languages. As far as I hypothesize that the investigation of core vocabulary is the key to understanding the regularities and inner mechanisms of lexicon evolution the first step of it is to define the limits of core vocabulary of East Slavonic languages taken separately – Russian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian. This paper focuses on this preliminary stage of research and aims more at provoking questions than providing answers. The method elaborated for the selection of core vocabulary of Germanic languages where in the corpus of core lexemes those are included which have been part of English since Old English, German – since Old High German can not be simply applied and needs to be reanalyzed. Thus, this logic ensnares us into the way of defining Russian core vocabulary as the corpus of lexemes that have been functioning in Russian since the Old Russian period. Meanwhile, the same will be claimed for Ukrainian and Byelorussian as Old Russian is the ancient period common for all East Slavonic languages. Will it be the core vocabulary of East Slavonic languages in general? Under such conditions, will it be possible to determine the limits of each of them taken separately? I consider that common core vocabulary of East Slavonic languages needs to be singled out as the corpus of lexemes dating back to Old Russian period and then the course of their evolution in Russian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian should be examined separately in order to trace its specificity and universality in each of them and verify the hypothesis. References: Carter, R. (1992): Vocabulary: Applied Linguistic Perspectives. London, New York. Galutskikh, I. (2007): Evolutsija istoricheskogo yadra leksicheskoj sistemy angliyskogo I nemetskogo yazykov v VIII- XX vv. (strukturny, semanticheskij, funktsional’ny analiz). Ph.D. dissertation, Zaporozhye National University. Hughes, G. (2000): A History of English Words. Oxford. Ogden, Ch.K. (1933): The Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar. London. Quirk, R. (1982): International communication and the concept of Nuclear English. In: Brumfit, Ch.J. (ed.): English for International Communication. Oxford et al., 15-28. Skybina, V., Galutskikh, I. (2007): Core vocabulary: spring and/or anchor. In: Abstracts of the XVIIIth International Conference on Historical Linguistics (August 6-11 2007). Quebec, Montreal, 123. 6. Stein, G. (1978): Nuclear English: reflections on the structure of its vocabulary. In: Poetica 10, 64-76. 26 Stubbs, M. (1986): Language development, lexical competence and Nuclear Vocabulary. In: Educational Linguistics, 98-115. Vinogradov, V. (1951): Ob osnovnom slovarnom fonde i ego slovoobrazuyuschey roli v istorii yazyka. In: Izvestija AN SSSR. Otdeleniye literatury i yazyka 10/3, 218-239. On the dual nature of the aphorism (a linguistic approach) GASZ, AGNIESZKA University of Silesia, Sosnowiec (Poland) E-Mail:

The present study investigates the dual textual status of the aphorism. The basic purpose of this presentation is to verify the hypothesis that the aphorism is a text of dual nature. The aphorism as a literary and linguistic phenomenon constitutes an interesting subject of an in-depth and multi-faceted linguistic analysis. In academic literature the aphorism is defined as a concise statement expressing a general truth, a psychological, philosophical or moral reflection which is distinguished by stylistic expressiveness and brilliance. It may function as a autonomous work or as a part of a larger work or statement. The analysis of the research material is aimed at receiving an answer to the following question: can the aphorism be regarded as a text of dual nature? The theoretical discussion will be illustrated by the material drawn from Russian and Polish sources. In present-day aphoristic collections textual material is classified by category or by author. Autonomous aphorisms or thoughts abstracted from larger narratives are included in studies. According to J. Glensk, the principle of excluding thoughts derived from the works of authors who never dealt with this genre from aphoristic collections is erroneous. This stance results from recognizing the fact emphasized by many literary scholars that the aphorism may function within a larger work, for instance, as a recapitulating punch line. Taking into consideration the way of functioning of the aphorism in a text, N. Fiedorienko, L. Sokolskaja distinguish the so called isolated aphorism and an interjected aphorism respectively. This attitude is shared by linguists as well. G. Zolotova perceives short, compressed forms such as an aphorism or proverb as the so-called generic component, whereas K. Mosio ek-K osi ska describes this phenomenon as “a text in a text”. The aphorism as an autonomous text has existed since Hippocrates’ times. Modern aphorisms are marked by a slightly different character. Many authors who successfully dealt with this genre as an autonomous form have a place in the pantheon of the world aphoristic art (S.J. Lec, G. Laub and many others). In collections containing autonomous aphorisms many examples of aphorisms concerning aphorisms themselves can be found. They constitute their authors’ reflection on the generic nature of the aphorism and the essence of an aphoristic art where brevity and universality are predominant features. Vivid metaphors point to the affinity of the aphorisms with a larger work. The autonomy of the aphorism is evidenced by examples coming from modern Polish aphoristic collections. The functioning of the aphorism in a text is presented on the basis of the material selected from Russian fiction in Polish translation. The discussion of the aphorism as a part of a context focuses on the problem of distinguishing a part of a certain entity. Fiction provides many examples of generalizing aphoristic reflections, functioning in a text as quotations. The selected 27 examples illustrate the most important ways of introducing the aphorism into other texts. The devices which allow the incorporation of the aphorism into the structure of another text include an indirect quotation of an aphorism (with a note about its author), adducing its author or source or a particular communicational situation and the casual weaving of aphorisms in the structure of a text by means of suitable syntactic procedures. A borrowed aphorism (quoted in inverted commas) is introduced into a text after a colon or an ellipsis. Another indication of a reference to an aphorism are the following expressions: as they say, as somebody says/used to say etc. Within a larger work, aphorisms which do not reveal any affinity with other works are merged into the structure of a subordinate clause. The claim about the dual nature of the aphorism is undeniably validated by the collected research material. Therefore, the aphorism can be considered a text of dual nature. Russian Interjections: Principles of Description GRAF, ELENA Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany) E-Mail:

The linguistic status of interjections and the question of their categorisation is one of the burning issues in present day linguistics. The treatment of these units varies in several grammars. Interjections are often referred to as parts of speech, discourse particles, sound gestures, sentences or interactive units. The whole complex of morphologic, syntactic and semantic criteria which is usually used to describe the separate parts of speech is not applicable with respect to interjections. In view of morphology interjections have no affixes. From the syntactic point of view they commonly form separate utterances and do not convey the category of predicativity. In the view of semantic approach the meaning of interjection cannot be described by means of denotation or signification. Speakers use interjections to express the importance of what they have in mind at a particular point in a conversation, without fully displaying their thinking. The above mentioned features show that the functions of interjections are deeply rooted on the pragmatic level of language. The purpose of this paper is to focus on how to sharpen the definition and description of interjections and contribute to our understanding of what they are doing in discourse. Form and function of interjections are usually very closely connected. From the prosodic properties of interjections, such as tones, tone pitch or reduplication, often derive their pragmatic functions. The interaction of prosodic and functional characteristics of interjections will be shown by means of phonetic diagrams of selected examples from Russian spoken language. The diagrams confirm the important role of intonation at the formation of the concrete pragmatic function of interjections. 28 Achievement and Accomplishment Encoded by Polish Verbal Prefix: A Formal Approach GWIAZDECKA, EWA University of Warsaw (Poland) E-Mail:

This paper defines an aspectual system encoded by Polish verbal prefixes and proposes its formal description it the framework of topology and combinatory logic showing how the diachronic relation between preposition and prefix contributes to aspectuality. Slavonic aspect is considered as an opposition between the imperfective and perfective form of a verb. Traditionally, this category is seen as purely grammatical one and thus encoded by inflectional morphemes (suffixes). It follows that linguists refuse aspectual character to verbal prefixes as they are leading to lexical derivation. And if some positions let the prefixation enter the aspectual door, this is under the condition that the prefix does not change the meaning of the basic imperfective verb. A verbal prefix marks the perfective aspect (with exception to some verbs basically perfective). The traditional semantical interpretation of this application refers to the completion of the ongoing process. We argue in this paper that aspectual category can be seen in the broader sense if we provide a strong metalanguage for its description. Let us consider the examples below: IMPF (1) Jan list write.PAST letter Jan was writing a letter…’ PERF (2) Jan na list on-write.PAST letter Jan has written the letter’ PERF (3) Jan do list Jan to-write.PAST letter Jan has finished writing the letter’ In the classical view, only the prefix na- on’ in (2) could be considered as an aspectual marker as it does not change the meaning of the verb marking merely its completion’. The aspectual description we propose takes into account all prefixes applicable to a verb. This point of view supposes that the definition of completion’ has to be re-examined. First of all, the meaning of the prefix originating from the preposition does not necessarily expresses the end of the process (like in 2), but it can mean one of its phases (the completion of the end, like do to’ in 3). Secondly, aspect is not limited to the verb only, but it concerns all terms of the predicative relations. Consequently, at the same time as the process has been completed, the object (in 2 and 3) has been modified. The simultaneous completion of the process and object modification (or a place changing – for a verb of movement) we shall call an achievement. The simultaneous completion of the process and the changing of the agent's states we shall call an accomplishment ( to have missed’, to have gone for a walk’). 29 We propose a formal description of aspect by means of topological intervals. On the other hand, the combinatory logic permits to show the compositional character of aspectual operators at different levels of representation. These formalisms clearly contribute to compare the aspectual category cross-linguistically which allows to develop the rules for natural language processing in applications like time ontologies or temporal and spatial information retrieval. Slavic Languages in Contact with Yiddish and Colonist German in Eastern Europe HELLWIG-FABIAN, INESSA University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany) E-Mail:

Until World War II, there were some regions in Eastern Europe, where speakers of Yiddish and German lived in close vicinity of each other. Yiddish was widespread all over Eastern and Central Europe (the eastern border being the Pale of Settlement until 1917), whereas German was only spoken in the so-called Sprachinseln. A lot of German colonists accepted the invitation of the Czars at the end of 18th century (settling along the Volga river) and at the beginning of 19th century (settling near the Black Sea). The impact of Slavic languages on Colonist German dialects and Eastern Yiddish has often been the subject of linguistic research – mostly independently of each other. There are some parallels in the development of these two Germanic languages in a Slavophone environment, but there are differences as well. Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe began much earlier. Slavophone Jews, who already lived there, influenced the Jews who came from the West, speaking Judaeo-German, an early form of Yiddish. The Slavic impact on Eastern Yiddish was very deep, influencing not only the lexicon, but morphology, syntax and phonetics as well. Later on, Yiddish may have functioned as a role model for German in integrating Slavic loanwords and building some syntactic structures influenced by the neighbouring languages. When German settlers arrived in Eastern Europe, Yiddish-speaking Jews were the only people they understood. Therefore, Yiddish mediation for some Slavic loanwords in East European German dialects is very likely, though it is not always possible to say with last evidence, whether a Polish or Ukrainian word took its way into colonial German via Yiddish or not. The knowledge of both Yiddish and German dialects spoken there might help to investigate this for each lexeme of interest. For example, the word bunder in a local German dialect of Bessarabia, which is said to be a ukrainianism, is very likely to have taken its way into German through Yiddish because the Ukrainian word bondar' „cooper” sounds like ['bund Yiddish dialect of that area. For many other words there is no such evidence, they might have come into German directly from the Slavic languages of the neighbourhood. One of such words is mišajen „to disturb”. Though it could not be found in any Yiddish dicitionary, it might have been common in some local Yiddish dialect. But even if the author of the loanword-list says that it is a yiddism, the word has no specific sound features which could confirm this. Therefore one must be extremely careful when analyzing so-called yiddisms and slavisms in the German dialects formerly spoken in Eastern Europe. In my article I am going to show 30 some ways of providing evidence whether a word came into colonial German with Yiddish mediation or not. I hope that it can contribute to a further investigation of the relationships between Jews, Slavs and Germans in Eastern Europe. Do antipassive constructions exist in Polish? JANIC, KATARZYNA University of Lyon 2 (France) E-Mail:

Antipassive, i.e. derived intransitive constructions in which the patient-like argument loses its status of a nuclear argument, constitutes a main topic in the syntactic description of ergative languages (Comrie 1978, Dixon 1979, Foley/Van Valin 1984, Givón 1984, 2001). The purpose of this paper is to question a traditional claim based on Silverstein's assumption (1976), according to which the antipassive phenomenon is strictly reserved for languages of ergative alignment and is not found in the accusative ones. The present study investigates Polish as an accusative language. So far, the question of antipassive in Polish has not been investigated much, apart from few attempts (Ka 1987, Geniusiene 1987). In order to show that the antipassive is indeed extant in Polish, I, first, analyse the morphosyntactic properties of the antipassive construction, and, then, determine the semantic and pragmatic conditions which the predicate and its nuclear arguments must fulfil to occur in antipassive. In this talk, I will present the preliminary corpus-based results concerning clauses with finite verbs and 3rd person arguments. The example in (1b) illustrates an intransitive construction derived from the corresponding transitive one in (1a), which is claimed here to represent the antipassive in Polish: (1) a. pcha dzieci. Boy.NOM push.3p.s children.ACC.3p.pl ‘The boy pushes the children’ b. Boy.NOM push.3p.s RM2 Lit. ‘The boy pushes himself” ‘The boy pushes the children’ The study of the data provides evidence that Polish possesses a construction with the same valence reduction as the antipassive of ergative languages. All examined constructions show strong homogeneity in terms of their syntactic and semantic behaviour. A patient-like argument is suppressed but still semantically present, whereas the agent-like argument keeps all the syntactic and semantic properties it has in the transitive construction. Furthermore, all derived verbs in antipassive constructions are morphologically marked by the grammatical element si . It is also significant that all Polish antipassive constructions impose semantic restrictions on the nuclear 2 RM stands for reflexive marker. 31 arguments involved in the transitive constructions. Both the implied patient-like argument, which is always of minimal semantic specificity as well as the agent-like argument must be human. The possibility to use verbs in the antipassive constructions depends on their semantic type. On the basis of the lexical aspectual classification proposed by Vendler (1957), we observe that mostly telic verbs like pcha ‘push’, bi ‘bite’, kopa ‘kick’ intervene in antipassive constructions. References: Comrie, B. (1978): Ergativity. In: Lehmann, W.P. (ed.): Syntax Typology. Austin, 137-172. Dixon, R.M.W. (1979): Ergativity. In: Language 55, 59-138. Foley, W.A., van Valin, R.D. (1984): Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar. Cambridge. Geniusiene, E. (1987): The Typology of Reflexives. Berlin. Givon, T. (1979): On Understanding Grammar. New York. Givon, T. (2001): Syntax. Amsterdam. Hopper, P., Thompson, S.A. (1980): Transitivity in grammar and discourse. In: Language 56, 251-299. Kanski, Z. (1984): Arbitrary Reference and Reflexivity: A Generative Study of the Polish P Equivalents. Katowice. K , W. (1982): constructions and their English counterparts. In: Papers and Studies in Contrastive Linguistics 15, 55-65. , W. (1987): Reflexivisation in English and Polish: an Arc Pair Grammar Analysis. Tübingen. Lazard, G. (1989): Transitivity and markedness: the antipassive in accusative languages. In: Mišeska Tomi , O. (ed.): Markedness in Synchrony and Typology. Berlin, 309-331. Levin, B., Rappaport Hovav, M. (2005): Argument Realisation. Cambridge. Shibatani, M. (1988): Passive and Voice. Amsterdam. Siewierska, A. (1988): The passive in Slavic. In Shibatani, M. (ed.): Passive and Voice. Amsterdam, 243-290. Silverstein, M. (1976): Hierarchy of features and ergativity. In Dixon, R.M.W.(ed.): Grammatical Categories in Australian Languages. New Jersey, 112-171. Vendler, Z. (1957): Verbs and Times. In: Philosophical Review 56, 143-160. A Quantitative Study of German Compound Nouns and their Polish Equivalents JUNCZYS-DOWMUNT, MARCIN E-Mail:

We present preliminary results of a quantitative, contrastive study of the structural and semantic relations that arise between German compound nouns (GCNs) and their Polish equivalents. The main premise has been to use only automatic tools for the collection of the data as well as for the analysis of the collected parallel pairs. We show that interesting linguistic insights can be obtained despite of the use of generally error-prone methods as long as the analysed data set is large enough and as long as it remains large even after various filtering techniques have been applied. The topic of GCNs and their Polish equivalents has been investigated before, the most extensive study so far being Jeziorski (1983). Jeziorski relies on a set of roughly 3000 GCNs and corresponding Polish phrases that where manually extracted from handbooks on German word- formation and bilingual German-Polish dictionaries. Mainly aspects of word formation and syntax are contrasted, semantic aspects have not been investigated. 32 Our study is based on a large parallel corpus – the German-Polish part of the third release of the JRC-Acquis parallel corpus (Steinberger et al. 2006) which is a subset of the body of law of the European Union ranging from 1956 to 2006. We collected 2,163,620 GCN tokens which correspond to 144,207 GCN types. For about 50,000 compound noun types we were able to identify their Polish equivalents with an precision of approximately 93% using statistical alignment models and additional linguistical knowledge for filtering. We describe our methods of automatic data analysis for both languages, including splitting and semantic interpretation of the GCNs, syntactic parsing of the Polish equivalents, bracketing of GCNs using structural evidence from their Polish counterparts, and mutual semantic disambiguation using a parallel German-Polish thesaurus. All methods of analysis are evaluated against a manually annotated test set. An overview of structural patterns identified for both language is given. We contrast part- of-speech structures of the GCN segments, bracketing structures and automatically identified semantic relations between the GCN segments with the syntactic and semantic structure of their Polish equivalents. All results are ordered by statistical significance. The impact of errors introduced due to the application of unsupervised methods is discussed and examples how these error can be minimised using evidence from parallel data are given. The perhaps greatest advantage of using fully automatic methods – once they have been developed and tested – is the ease of reapplying them to other sources of data the moment they become available. We show how our results improve after adding parallel data from the European Union published in 2007 which is not yet included in the third version of the JRC-Acquis. References: Jeziorski, J. (1983): Substantivische Nominalkomposita des Deutschen und ihre polnischen Entsprechungen. . Steinberger, R.et al. (2006): The jrc-acquis: A multilingual aligned parallel corpus with 20+ languages. CoRR, abs/cs/0609058. Informal publication. The Helsinki Annotated Corpus of Russian Texts HANCO: A Tool for Teaching and Learning of Russian KOPOTEV, MIKHAIL University of Helsinki (Finland) E-Mail:

The HANCO Corpus project has been running since 2001 in the Department of Slavonic and Baltic Languages and Literatures at the University of Helsinki. The main principles of creation are: • Orientation to a wider audience. In drawing up the HANCO corpus and its computer interface, the creators have kept in mind as potential users not only a narrow circle of experts, but also students and teachers of Russian, including L2 teachers. This does not mean that the use of linguistic terms is avoided, but the choice of parameters for a search is carried out in such a way as to minimize the amount of specialized knowledge required. • Orientation to the traditional conception of a language. In compiling the set of parameters it has been preferred to establish theoretical concepts, which are used in 33 widely known linguistic works and/or in textbooks on Russian grammar. This is due to the demand of setting a low threshold for the use of the Corpus. • Orientation to the accuracy of the grammatical description, not to the amount of annotated material. The purpose is to create an annotated corpus containing more exact grammatical and functional information than is the case in existing or planned larger Russian corpora. • Orientation to multilevel grammatical information. The HANCO corpus contains multilateral grammatical information including morphological, syntactic, and functional (semantic) characteristics. They can be combined in the process of searching. • Possibility of alternative interpretations. Any researcher working with concrete language material will have come across the fact that it is difficult or even impossible in many cases to classify linguistic units in an unequivocal way. In creating the HANCO, we made the decision to accept the possibility of alternative interpretations of linguistic facts. Such seeming illegibility demands a lot of manual work, but it facilitates the searching of necessary information by the potential user. The following types of linguistic information are to be included in the HANCO. • Morphological information. In the HANCO, complete morphological description of every running word is given. The morphological analysis and the subsequent disambiguation procedure have been carried out automatically, with further manual processing. • Syntactic information. This is given at two levels: clauses and sentences. The full description of units for every level is carried out according to the wildly accepted tradition to the description of Russian syntax. • Functional-semantic information. The Corpus is a component of the Contrastive Functional Syntax project conducted by Professor A. Mustajoki. Due to this link, the HANCO will also provide information based on semantic categories, the list of which is being elaborated by A. Mustajoki's scientific team. The HANCO is created step by step. The first results (the morphological and syntactic parts) have already been achieved at www.slav.helsinki.fi/hanco, thus it can be used as a tool in teaching and learning of Russian. The report will present some possible applications of the corpus. Albanian Borders inside Russian – An Approach Towards a Classification of a New Russian Internet Slang KORIN, IGOR’ VLADIMIROVI Moscow State University (Russia) E-Mail:

The aim of this work is to describe and analyze the formal features of the so called albansky/olbansky or padonkaff language3. 3 Named after an incident in which an American user asked: “What language is that? Albansky?” Podonok (=amoral person). Padonky, probably connected to the heroes of the novel “Bolshe Bena” by underground writers Sergey Sakin (Spider) and Pavel Tetersky. http://www/guelman.ru/slava/debut/sakin_tetersky1.htm 34 This new Russian language code started to spread in Russian Internet (Runet) from the end of 1990-ies from Fido4 and became widely spread after 2004. Recently it entered the realm of print mass media, and not only through its use in advertisement5 The albansky code includes words and cliché’s from other slangs and jargons as well as Russian non-normative vocabulary. Yet, linguistic descriptions are still under construction6. The formal analysis aims towards a classification of the paradigm of the rules of misspelling in the albansky code. These units will then be classified on the basis of their formal and semantic correspondence to the normative words and compared by their quantity of appearance in different segments of Runet as well as by their origin7. This is the basis to classify the lexicon in units that are simply mechanically misspelled and units that have undergone a semantic change. Main features are so called erratives, grotesque orthographical mistakes. They emerge in a specific pattern of alternate spelling. Voiced consonants are replaced with their voiceless counterparts (which are sometimes doubled) avtor-afftar, and vice versa. Silent consonants are not resembled uchastnik-uchasneg. For unstressed vowels, o is replaced with a and e with i (privet-preved), or vice versa. But sometimes orthographical changes are followed by changing of lexical semantics. For example unusual wordbuilding patterns that seem to be rather borrowed from other languages like German; i.e. the numeral pitsot (five hundred or many) is combined with sto by simply eliminating the blank, and this new word stopitsot means “a great amount”. Using computational translation systems is also a source for generating new words/meanings in the albansky code. The English word fans can be translated as ventilators or as supporters. In albansky both are combined to fantilatory, with the meaning of “greeting to funny guys”. Therefore it is proposed to analyze the semantic addition that follows the orthographic changes. This will be achieved by analysis of the vocabularies, by analysis of web/blog contents and third by questionnaires given to the students of Moscow State University. As a result, the criteria relevant for creating the representative vocabulary of albansky should be elaborated. In one ‘corpus’ of albansky (located at Yandex.ru) more than 160 units are listed, out of them 81% have undergone semantic changes. This research provides a source of information to foreigners as well as to the majority of Russians that barely use the internet. Moreover, albansky adds to the traditional opposition of “ours/aliens” a new meaning – it separates the pro albansky users from the ones that oppose it or have never heard of it. Thus a new border inside Russia is created, which this research seeks to make more permeable. Example of a table of albansky units classified on their origin and changing of semantics. 4 The Russian attempt to create an internet of their own.. 5 It’s interesting, that in presidential PR-campaign of Medvedev the image-makers emphasized his knowledge of this “language” to increase his popularity by the slogan “The new president will speak a language we understand”. 6 Here are to name the works by Gassan Gussejnov: Berloga Webloga. 2005. http://www.speakrus.ru/gg/ microprosa_erratica-1.htm and bz Ch. Boutler 1997-2008 http://www.russkimat.net/d/padonkoff.htm 7 The main sources of origin are known quotations of popular Russian politicians, Russian (fantasy) fiction, national anecdotes, teenager slang, borrowed words, humorous quotations from various chats, sport- and criminal jargons. 35 Example Meaning Origin Additional meaning vs. original words Adnaznachna! Expression of an em- From «odnoznachno», Emotional connotation phasized confidence of popular unit from lexicon correctness of the words of a famous politician mentioned above V.V. Zhirinovsky Abanamat! Exclamation of irrita- Probably, concerned to Emotional connotation tion or great astonish- often quotation of the ment (errative from book by S. Dovlatov abusive eb’ona mat’). «Nashi». Achtung! Warning about From German Achtung – New meaning on the shocking content of attention basis of metonymical postings. Quite often as transformations a hint that gays take part in chatting (achtungi, achtungery) Bajan , bojan, Expression of blaming The origin is connected New meaning on the bajancheg, in comments censuring with regular posting old basis of metonymical also “kreatif” and empha- joke “Horonili t’oshchu, transformations. gormoshko sizing that it is a mere porvali dva bajana” on (+gormoshko as a copy of old famous the sites like anekdot.ru metaphor) text/texts. Like: “Bajan. (from 07.03.1999.) Bylo god nazad!” V Bobrujsk, Absolutely negative Connected with the New phraseological zhyvotnoe!, expression that can be virtual community bo- unit on the basis of f Babrujsk, addressed to a low bruisk that created «getto ironical interpretation zhyvotnaje intellectual or amoral Bobruisk-city», of a popular fiction person. The author where they used to send text should be absolutely people with low IQ8 ignored V gazenvagen! Very negative reaction Connected with „black New meaning on to the author or his post jokes” about tortures and metaphorical basis (from broken German executions. Also: F Gaswagen - mobile gas topku! chamber) i.e.: go to the gas chamber! Zachot, High positive mark; Parody of a Russian New meaning on the zachod; perfect, very good system passed/not passed. basis of metonymy zachotnyj with amelioration 8 The Community of bobruisk.ru was named probably after the mentioning of the Belorussian city of Bobruisk in the story by V. Sorokin “The Accident”. The connection with Bobruisk as an image of fiction can also be found in the mentioning of it as an ideal city for the Children of Lieutenant Shmidt in the famous novel “The Golden Calf“ by I. Ilf and E. Petrov. 36 Ukrainian Nicknames: The Problem of their Classification KRAVCHENKO, LYUDMYLA Kiev National University (Ukraine) E-Mail:

Proper names of people are a valuable source for the study of the lexical system and determination of semantic, morphological and structural features of language. The questions of functioning and structure of unofficial names, mostly individual nicknames, were the subject of some articles of Polish (A. Tomczak, M. Biolik), Slovak (V. Blanar), Russian (Y. Danilina , G. Simina) and other linguists. In Ukrainian onomastics it is possible to determine three stages, when nicknames were researched more intensively: (1) the end of the century, (2) the seventies of the century, (3) the beginning of the century. However, in Ukrainian linguistics there is no special investigation devoted to the elaboration of a firm terminology or the motivation base and structure of nicknames that occur on large territories. Thus, modern nicknames and other unofficial names in Ukrainian anthroponymics have been neglected undeservedly. The official last names of people were mostly formed on the base of nicknames. The process of creation of last names was completed in the century, but the process of creating new nicknames and other unofficial names is going on even today, and will without doubt proceed in the future, as nicknames have become an inalienable element of communication. The material of our research is made up by people’s nicknames which were collected during expeditions in the villages of the Poltava Region. This is the central part of the Ukraine. Therefore, the aim of our work is to investigate people’s nicknames which occur in the central part of the Ukraine. For this purpose it is necessary to solve the following problems: (1) to establish the base of the nicknames, where every lexical unit will be described in terms of the type of the nickname, the motive of nomination, its functioning, emotional-expressive colouring, age, its relation to the official name of the person, the place of occupation and others; (2) to classify all the material according to some criteria; (3) to show the modern state of the system of Ukrainian nicknames at the beginning of the XXI century. Our research will help to describe such issues as: I. Types of Ukrainian nicknames (street nicknames, individual nicknames, family nicknames). . Lexical base of nicknames: 1. Nicknames derived from the last name and the first name of a person; 2. Nicknames connected to the ethnic or territorial origin of a person; 3. Nicknames that specify the profession or some kind of activity; 4. Nicknames with appellatives as bases; . Classification of nicknames according to the motive of nomination: 1. Nicknames that appeared on the basis of features of speaking; 2. Nicknames that specify features and traits of people; The collection and study of nicknames demonstrates the powerful word-formation fantasy of people and the enormous potential possibilities of the anthroponymical system of the Ukrainian language. It can be shown that the formation of nicknames plays an important part in exposing the ways of formation of Ukrainian personal names during different periods. 37 Combinability of + nouns KRUMBHOLZ, GERTJE University of Hamburg (Germany) E-Mail:

My paper deals with the different combination possibilities of with nouns. The phasal auxiliary is the regular and typical way of expressing the beginning of actional situations in Polish. Usually is combined with imperfective infinitives and indicates the beginning of the expressed actional situation. However can not only be combined with infinitives but also – then fullfilling the function of a full verb – with nouns. These can be verbal, nonverbal abstract (e.g. ) and even concrete nouns (e.g. ). The analysis of this variety of combinatorics of with several types of nouns is the main topic of my paper. My objective is to discover which criteria delimit the possibility of combination with , i.e. to identify the specifics of these abstract and concrete nouns that enable them to be combined with and influence the meaning of the constructions. I assume the combinations of concrete nouns with (e.g. ) to be elliptic: an actional situation is connotated (here or ) whose beginning is expressed. What we are dealing with here are metonymies – although the beginning of the actional situation is here the intended meaning, the depending object is expressed instead. What actional situation will be connotated depends in my opinion in many but not in all cases on the context/the conversational situation. A differentiation is to be made between ‘ad hoc formations‘, which can be deciphered only in one particular context, and common formations that typically connotate a specific actional situation (prioritized/default connotation). These prioritized connotations can be verified by means of the associative dictionary (Karaulov) and the number of examples of such elliptic constructions in Polish search engines. Let us take as an example: the actional situation usually connotated is the one expressed by (cp. in Karaulov’s dictionary the most frequent association with in form of a verb is ). If the beginning of another situation (not corresponding to the one usually connotated) ought to be expressed (e.g. ) no elliptic construction is used. Rather the intended actional situation (not according with the one the reader/listener has in mind) is directly expressed unless a specific context limits the possibilities of the missing component to one and only one possible actional situation. At first glance the number of concrete nouns that can be combined with is limited. Whether this observation could be affirmed in my studies will be presented in my speech aiming at a detailed description of the factors that determine the combinatorics of + concrete nouns. Concerning the combination of and abstract nouns I focus on those abstract nouns that are not deverbal derivations but can still be combined with (e.g. ). In my opinion, these nouns are characterized by the expression of situations/events that include a specific sequence of actional situations. For these actional situations a form of mental script is available. If the listener/reader has at his command suchlike mental models of the sequence of the actional situations expressed by the abstract noun, he is able to mentally put the situations into phases and isolate the expressed beginning phase. In this subject my aim is to identify the specific characteristics of the abstract nouns that enable them to be combined with zacz and that have influence on the meaning of the construction. 38 What is the Difference Between BOUNDEDNESS and WHOLENESS? The Case of the Unit do cna ‘entirely’ KUBICKA, EMILIA E-Mail:

This presentation recounts some of the results of my research on the syntax and semantics of adverbs denoting boundary. My attempt is to answer the question about the difference between BOUNDARY and WHOLENESS and to show on the example of the unit do cna ‘entirely’ the possibility of co-occurrence of the meanings of boundedness and wholeness. Contrary to a common assumption in linguistics, I propose the thesis that BOUNDEDNESS is not a subtype of WHOLENESS (Kleszczowa 2005). I would like to briefly present the results of my research concerning the concept of BOUNDARY, discuss the concept of WHOLENESS in ontology, the PART – WHOLE relation as well as the correlation between BOUNDARY and WHOLENESS. I suggest that the discrepancies in interpretation of the last two concepts arise from the lack of differentiation between two levels of language use – the general and the metalinguistic one. It is only in the metalanguage that WHOLENESS is ascribed boundaries. Since neither linguistics nor philosophy give answer to the question about the difference between BOUNDEDNESS and WHOLENESS, I propose my own, arbitrary, solution which enables to distinguish the units denoting boundary from the adverb group. I propose the thesis that there are adverbs denoting both WHOLENESS and BOUNDARY, which I exemplify with do cna ‘entirely’. The unit do cna ‘entirely’ belongs to the group of so-called gradation expressions, designed to provide information about emotions (persuasive function) and about transgressing some norm common to communication participants. The examined sequence is first described within the context of other gradation expressions denoting boundary. As a next step, I prove, in accordance with the principles of the structuralist school, that it is a unit of language and an adverb, and engage in polemics with the definition of adverb proposed by Wajszczuk (2005). In order to extract the components of meaning of this unit, I place it in opposition to other units (do szczetu, ze szczetem ‘entirely’), comparing the example material found in the PWN Corpus of Polish and in general dictionaries. I briefly comment on various dictionary definitions. The aim of semantic analysis is to establish the meaning components of the unit, and to provide an explication of the unit that should, according to the assumptions of the structuralist school, contain – if possible – the simplest possible units, i.e. so-called indefinibilia (Wierzbicka 1980). I acknowledge that the adverb do cna ‘entirely’ communicates about the sender’s evaluation concerning the attributes of the object acquired as a result of the action expressed by the means of a perfective verb. I claim that these properties, originally expressed by means of passive participles, can at present be expressed also by means of non-deverbal adjectives. These attributes relate to the meaning of both the WHOLENESS and the BOUNDARY. If we can ascribe a given characteristic to the whole object, then we talk about WHOLENESS. We may talk about BOUNDEDNESS in the same case only if we are able to state that the intensity of this particular feature cannot be greater (the condition of encompassing the whole object is anyway not relevant for boundary). The suggested explication takes into consideration three syntactic schemata in which this unit occurs. 39 BOUNDARY WHOLENESS end (beginning) whole the ‘finitedness’ (‘completeness’) of the object ‘complete’ object, i.e. considered as a whole is not important (all parts) belongs to the object, is its part – we talk about division of the object into parts is limited; we gradable features do not talk here about gradable features it communicates about the object / action that no information about the intensity of the those properties of both that are discussed property or about the (non)possibility of cannot be more intensive / greater etc. increasing it allows talking about the object and isolating it if we talk about it, it is in a sense redundant, at all since we assume that all objects are ‘whole’,‘complete’ Table 1. Differences between the concepts of BOUNDARY and WHOLENESS Space and Time LOIKOVA-NASSENKO, TATYANA and STIESSOVA, JITKA Charles University Prague (Czech Republic) E-Mail:

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The issue of the categories of Space and Time and the relations between them were always in the centre of attention of philosophers, historians, sociologists, philologists and representatives of many other fields of science. It is difficult to specify exact limits between these two categories: these concepts allow due to their affinity various ways of analysis and various interpretations of their mutual relations. The categories of Space and Time can be analyzed in different languages either in a strict or in a wide sense, they can be analyzed inside or outside of the system of language, they can be described with the help of lexical means, with the help of various levels of the grammatical system of language (morphological categories, grammatical forms), they can be expressed by various relations inside texts or situational contexts. At the same time we can observe a connection with history, culture, politics and the development of a society or of individual nations. Language (languages) reflect(s) the development of our attitude to these categories, in connection with changes in the consciousness of mankind, with the development of knowledge of reality, with changes in economy, technical development etc. Cultural and linguistic aspects of these categories influence each other. The categories of Space and Time are connected with localization – of substance and process. The main means of the localization of process in Space and Time is the verb with its grammatical categories (especially the categories of time and aspect). In our contribution we will compare the possibilities of expressing the localization of Process in the Russian and Czech language systems. We will analyze several Russian and Czech verbs of movement from the point of view of lexical, lexico-semantic and grammatical aspects of the realization of this kind of 40 process. There are some differences between the Czech and Russian language in representing Time and Space on various levels of language, which shows the variability and non-universality of these categories in both languages. The Earliest Witnesses of the Old Church Slavonic Sticherarion MALYGINA, MARIA Russian Academy of Sciences Moscow (Russia) E-Mail:

The Sticherarion is a single-genre hymnographical collection containing hymns arranged according to the feast calendar of the ecclesiastical year of the Eastern Church. There are two different types of the Sticherarion: 1) the Menaion Sticherarion containing hymns for the fixed dates of the ecclesiastical year, and 2) the Lenten Sticherarion containing hymns for the Lenten liturgical cycle. The source base are two manuscripts dating from the 12th century: The Minaion Sticheraria BAN 34.7.6 and GIM Syn.279, both of them originated in Novgorod (this is proved by examples of Cokan'e). By comparing the sources mentioned above with other available copies of the Sticheraria dating from the 12th century (in particular MS GIM Syn.572) we can see the distinct difference between the two versions, which are probably of Southern and Northern origin. These versions have common features in grammar and lexis as well as in their contents and the order of the chants. According to our preliminary results, the contents of the MSS BAN 34.7.6 è Syn.279, 418 are the same. 87 stichera attested by Syn. 279 are missing in BAN 34.7.6, although the number of hymns in this copy exceeds that in the Syn.279. The composition of the hymns contained in BAN 34.7.6 and GIM Syn.279 is very similar, especially in the offices for the most important holidays (such as the Nativity, Epiphany, Transfiguration, and Assumption). The number of chants for these days is usually great. The similarity and unity of these sources can be also demonstrated by their linguistic parameters, for example, the use of conjunctions or prefixes, word order, the omission of words or even whole phrases, and the use of certain grammatical forms (those of case or tense). The origin of both versions, however, still remains to be established. Universal and Language-Specific Properties of Closing Suffixation: Types of Closing Suffixes in Bulgarian and German MANOVA, STELA University of Vienna (Austria) E-Mail:

This paper discusses restrictions on suffix combinations in Bulgarian and German in terms of closing suffixes. Closing suffixes are suffixes that close the word to the addition of further suffixes. Closing suffixation can therefore be seen as a regulator of word length. Clearly, if a 41 language distinguishes between derivational and inflectional word slots (as Bulgarian and German do), two sets of closing suffixes should be established – one derivational and one inflectional. This paper provides a contrastive analysis of Bulgarian and German closing suffixes that occupy the derivational word slot. The Bulgarian data for the discussion come mainly from the Academy Grammar (Andrej in et al. 1983), dictionaries and the Internet, whereas German data are primarily based on Aronoff/Fuhrhop (2002), Fleischer/Barz (1995) and Wellmann (1975), and are also checked for possible exceptions in the Internet. Both sets of data were further controlled with judgements of native speakers. Logically, since (derivational) morphology operates with morphemes which exhibit form and semantics closing suffixes can be specified as depending on either formal or (and) semantic constraints. However, different languages express the same semantics through different forms, therefore one expects closing suffixation, if it is a universal phenomenon, to be semantically driven. An example of a universal semantic rule in respect to closing suffixation would be: suffixes deriving action nouns are closing cross-linguistically. It will be demonstrated that semantically constrained closing suffixes do exist, the semantic constraints involved, however, seem to be universal and language specific. Moreover, semantic restrictions alone cannot define a suffix as +/-closing. Based on these observations, I claim that there are different types of closing suffixes – suffixes that are always closing (cf. Aronoff/Fuhrhop 2002) and suffixes that are closing only if particular formal or (and) semantic conditions are fulfilled (cf. Manova 2008). The following two facts will be interpreted as supporting such an understanding of closing suffixation: 1) if closing semantics is expressed by a set of suffixes, not all the suffixes of the set are closing (e.g., of the two suffixes -ne and -nie which derive action nouns in Bulgarian only -ne is closing); and 2) a (set of) suffix(es) can be closing with a semantically restricted type of bases (e.g. suffixes deriving females from human males in Bulgarian), however, if the base of a derivation has another, though semantically related meaning (e.g. male animal), the suffix(es) is (are) not closing. References: (1983): Gramatika na s vremennija b lgarski knižoven ezik. Tom II. Morfologija. Sofija. Aronoff, M., Fuhrhop, N. (2002): Restricting Suffix Combinations in German and English: Closing Suffixes and the Monosuffix Constraint. In: Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 20, 451-490. Fleischer, W., Barz, I. (1995): Wortbildung der deutschen Gegenwartssprache. 2., durchgesehene und ergänzte Auflage. Tübingen. Manova, S. (2008): Closing Suffixes and the Structure of the Slavic Word: Movierung. In: Austrian Contributions to the 14th International Congress of Slavists, September 2008, Ohrid, Macedonia. Wiener Slawistisches Jahrbuch 54, 21-34. Wellmann, H. (1975): Deutsche Wortbildung 2 – Das Substantiv. Düsseldorf. 42 Aspect and Bounded Quantity Complements in Russian MEHLIG, HANS ROBERT University of Kiel (Germany) E-Mail:

My talk investigates the actional recategorization of agentive accomplishment- and achievement- predications when interpreted in a temporally distributive manner. Temporal distributivity is present in a verbal predication if it refers to several entities involved in the given situation not simultaneously but sequentially, i.e., one after the other. In this case we have an incremental relation and the complement, interpreted distributively, is a derived und thus a secondary increment. Therefore, the terminative or aterminative actionality of temporally distributive predications is dependent on whether the secondary increment involves a bounded or unbounded quantity. In Russian, the classification of a temporally distributive predication as terminative or aterminative as a result of its relation to a bounded or unbounded quantity is relevant for the category of aspect. If a temporal distributive predication involves an unbounded quantity and thus has an aterminative interpretation, then perfectivization is only possible with a so-called delimitative procedural verb, which delimits the situation temporally. Perfectivization via the paired perf. verb in the case of temporal distributivity is only possible, if the secondary increment involves a quantity bounded in its extent. Therefore, it would seem that in temporally distributive predications there is an interdependence between, on the one hand, bounded increments and the terminative interpretation, and, on the other hand, unbounded increments and the aterminative interpretation. I would like to show that, in fact, there is no such interdependence. It is true that predications with a secondary increment not bounded in its extent allow only an aterminative interpretation and therefore cannot be perfectivized with the paired perf. verb. However, predications with a secondary increment bounded in its extent are “hybrid” with regard to their actionality, i.e., they can be both terminative and aterminative and thus permit perfectivization not only by the paired perf. verb, but also by the delimitative procedural. I will show which conditions are necessary for predications with an increment, bounded in its extent to be interpreted as aterminative and allowing a perfectivization by the delimitative procedural. Russian Legal Terminology MUSHCHININA, MARIA Saarland University, Saarbrücken (Germany) E-Mail:

Legal terminology is the most important information source in the field of law. During the period of development of a legal system, terminology demonstrates a high degree of instability. For lack of up-to-date lexicographical sources, lexicography, technical translation and other fields of terminological analysis depend highly on the evaluation of text sources. What is needed is an empirically-based method of terminological description, considering the structure and methodology of the special field as well as the functions of its texts. The proposed model of 43 semantic description incorporates semasiological and onomasiological description of the relation between terminological expression (name) and legal concept, in particular the description of synonymy, polysemy and of incongruent usage of the terminology. It considers quantitative aspects of term application, and includes two perspectives of description: concept system and usage situation. This allows the building of so-called denomination-concept fields, thus providing information pertinent to the use of denomination and verbalising of concepts in question. The model of terminology description has been based on the analysis of Russian legal terminology of intellectual property, dating from 1992 to 2003. The corpus includes the most important Russian acts legislating intellectual property, texts of legal doctrine and law (approx. 874000 words), over 230 legal decisions (approx. 591000 words) and a terminological glossary including more then 440 commented entries. References: Apresjan, Ju.D. (21995): . Moskva. Busse, D. (1992): Recht als Text. Linguistische Untersuchungen zur Arbeit mit Sprache in einer gesellschaftlichen Institution. Tübingen. Grynenko, A. (2007): Die Terminologie des Gerichtswesens der Ukraine und Deutschlands im Vergleich. Stuttgart. Gubaeva, T.V. (2003): Jazyk i pravo. Moskva. Horn-Helf, B. (1997): Kondensation als terminologisches Prinzip im Russischen. Tübingen. Ohnheiser, I. (1979): Wortbildung und Synonymie. Leipzig. Czech-German Language Contact in an Isolated and Moribund Setting NEREO, FILIPPO University of Manchester (UK) E-Mail:

Previous work on the German minority in the Czech Republic has suggested that there is no, or very little, evidence of language contact phenomena in the remaining speech varieties of ethnic Germans in the 21st century, and that in more rural settings these have remained essentially archaic in nature, e.g. Bachmann (2003), Fürst (2003), and recent fieldwork carried out using traditional data elicitation techniques with interviewer and informant for the Atlas der historischen deutschen Mundarten in der Tschechischen Republik. Using a different methodological approach and minimising the effect of the ‘Observer’s Paradox’, however, data gathered from the remote German-speaking enclave of Vyškov/Wischau, around 30 km northeast of Brno in South Moravia – which has hitherto been the subject of very little linguistic investigation, with no more than snippets of Germans archaisms being documented in the largely comparative works of Beranek (1936) and Kranzmayer (1956) – appear to suggest a number of structural changes which are taking place as this variety approaches language obsolescence, and which may plausibly be attributed to the imposition of the Czech language since the end of WW II. These include, for example, semantic shifts and syntactic modifications as evidenced in the data presented in a) extension of the semantic repertoire of a word, and b) uniformity of reflexive pronouns: a) ‘ich bin gern, dass ich in den Klub gehe’ I am happy that I in the club go jsem ráda… 44 b) ‘aufm Friedhof treffen wir sich’ at the cemetery meet we REFL. … setkáváme se A further aim of this paper is to attempt to link the language-descriptive contact features recorded during recent fieldwork with the wider sociolinguistic context of stigmatised speech varieties. In particular, I shall examine the external factors which triggered language shift within this former enclave which may be seen as paradigmatic of the wider German community which remained in the Czech lands after 1946. References: Bachmann, A.R. (2003): Aufbau und Methodik des Forschungsprojektes "Atlas der historischen deutschen Mundarten in der Tschechischen Republik (ADT)". In: Greule, A., Nekula, M. (eds.): Deutsche und tschechische Dialekte im Kontakt. Wien. Beranek, F.J. (1936): Die Mundarten von Südmähren (Lautlehre). Reichenberg. Fürst, R.C. (2003). Sprachkontakt in Südmähren. In: Greule, A., Nekula, M. (eds.): Deutsche und tschechische Dialekte im Kontakt. Wien. Kranzmayer, E. (1956): Historische Lautgeographie des gesamtbairischen Dialektraumes. Wien. Automatic Collection, Annotation and Indexing of Czech Broadcast Speech NOUZA, JAN, ŽD'ÁNSKÝ, J and ERVA , PETR Technical University of Liberec (Czech Republic) E-Mails:

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In the paper we describe a complex system we developed for automatic acquisition of a large corpus of spoken Czech. The system is capable of continuous monitoring of a selected Czech TV station and providing automatic transcription of its audio track. The transcription is performed by our own speech recognition engine that employs a vocabulary with 320 thousand most frequent Czech words (and word-forms) together with a corresponding language model. Transcription accuracy is fairly good for studio speech (about 90 %), but may drop significantly for noisy recordings and spontaneous speech. Anyway, the system operates without any human supervision and during its operation in 2007 it collected, transcribed, stored and indexed more than 1800 hours of Czech spoken documents. Any word or any combination of words in this corpus can be easily searched by a full-text search engine. The engine finds all occurrences of the queried word(s), ranks them according to several relevancy criteria and prepares them for audio-visual replay (e.g. by the Windows Media Player). The response of the search & play engine is quite fast even though the found programs must be transferred (streamed) via internet from their original data store on the Web pages of the corresponding TV station. (This is fully in accordance with the copyright law.) During 2007, the system was employed to monitor CT24 channel, which is primarily a news and document broadcasting channel belonging to the state Czech TV. In this way we processed, i.e. transcribed and indexed, more than 50 different types of programs, namely daily news shows, regional news, weather reports, economic and cultural magazines, talk shows, press conferences, broadcast parliament sessions or even some historical castback programs, like “Czech TV 25 years ago ”. The collection is quite unique because it allows to search in and watch 45 to hundreds of spoken programs broadcast within one year. It allows not only for searching particular facts but also for analyzing speaking styles or pronunciation issues and to evaluate the performance of the recent ASR technology developed for Czech language. The search engine has an internet interface so that anybody can try it.9 Its simple layout is displayed in Fig. 1. To make a search, one should type one or more words into the interface’s text box. The query can be typed with diacritics or in plain ASCII, wild card symbols (* or ?) are also allowed. The search can be further narrowed by specifying the program name (using preposition IN), program channel (preposition ON), time period (SINCE and TILL) and even a speaker name (BY). The latter option is enabled by a speaker recognition module which is part of the complex transcription system. So, the following example query: “vaclav* havel OR havl* SINCE 01.01.2007 TILL 31.03.2007 BY klaus” can find what current president Vaclav Klaus said about ex-president Vaclav Havel in the specified time period. The system has been used mainly for demonstration purposes to show current possibilities and limitations of our speech recognition system. However, we believe that it may be useful also for people who are interested in linguistics, phonetics and other aspects of the Czech language. Fig. 1 – Search engine and its interface The query is displayed in the upper part. On the left side, there is a list of found programs in which the searched words occurred. On the right side, the Media Player is playing the selected program together with automatically generated Czech subtitles. 9 http://ahmed.ite.tul.cz/. 46 Quantitative Research Methods in Cross-Cultural Pragmatics OGIERMANN, EVA Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg (Germany) E-Mail:

This paper explores the possibilities offered by two data collection methods for the contrastive study of apologies in English and Russian. It compares experimental data elicited by means of a discourse completion test (DCT) with data extracted from linguistic corpora, specifically the British National Corpus and the Nacional’nyj Korpus Russkogo Jazyka. While DCTs provide responses to scenarios describing situations requiring an apology, corpora can be searched for all the forms associated with this speech act. However, apart from a number of formulaic expressions that can be easily identified within a corpus (such as sorry, apologise, forgive, izvinite or vinovat), apologies can also take the form of indirect strategies (e.g. expressions of self-criticism), which appear in questionnaire responses but are exceedingly difficult to locate within a corpus, unless accompanied by a formulaic apology. A corpus search then leads to a focus on form rather than function, allowing for the analysis of the different functions apology formulae can take, as well as the broader context in which they are used. Furthermore, while corpora include a broad range of text types and authors, DCT data are often elicited from one social group, such as students, making them less representative and generalisable than corpus data. However, DCT responses have been shown to approximate spoken language, whereas a great majority of the data accessible through a corpus is written. Another advantage of experimental data is that questionnaire scenarios can be constructed to include particular constellations of contextual variables, such as the social distance and power defining the relationship between the speakers, allowing for testing their impact on apology behaviour. Since DCTs can be translated, they yield fully comparable data across languages that reveal culture- specific conventions of apologising as well as differences in the speakers’ assessment of the social factors as reflected in their strategy choice. While the spoken data contained in the Nacional’nyj Korpus Russkogo Jazyka do not offer many opportunities for micro-sociolinguistic research, the British National Corpus contains an extensive spoken section comprising recordings of over 4700 speakers with different social and regional backgrounds. Each conversation contains a file header, providing such information as the age, gender and the relationships between the participants in a conversation, enabling the researcher to analyse the corpus according to a selection of sociolinguistic variables. However, due to the problems related to the identification of indirect apology strategies and, even more importantly, offences not apologised for, comparisons of apology behaviour and politeness norms across groups are problematic. This becomes most evident when attempting to compare languages by means of corpus data. References: Deutschmann, M. (2003): Apologising in British English. Umeå. Meyer, Ch.F. (2002): English Corpus Linguistics. An Introduction. Cambridge. Ogiermann, E. (in press): On the culture-specificity of linguistic gender differences: The case of English and Russian apologies. To appear in: Intercultural Pragmatics. British National Corpus, XML Edition. 2007. Oxford University Computing Services. Nacional’nyj Korpus Russkogo Jazyka. www.ruscorpora.ru 47 Conjunction and Particle versus Connector: an Example for Lexicography POLYAKOVA, SVETLANA University of Frankfurt (Germany) E-Mail:

The goal of the talk is to discuss and present a lexicographical format for items like the Russian až, which is – as a particle or conjunction – highly emotional in its meaning. The Russian až is different from the Czech, Slovak or Polish až, because it has on the one hand less meanings/uses and, on the other hand, some specific stylistic characteristics leading to more restrictions and more problems in finding equivalents when translating into other languages. Particles transfer speakers intentions, so the question is: how can the “až relevant intentions” be translated? (cf. Zybatow 1990:32f.). The Russian až is a very expressive particle (similar to the modal particles), which is in all uses primarily a focusing particle. We will support this point of departure through syntactic tests. If až has only one category, we have to propose a completely meaning oriented structure for the lexicographical entry of až. We explain the meaning of the focusing particle až and its different uses with the connector theory of Pasch et al. (2003), developed for German connectors in the Handbook of German Connectors. Connectors are defined as two-place-functors, which take two elements as arguments (Pasch et al. 2003). These arguments have to be sentences or can be reconstructed to sentences. If až is a connector in the sense of Pasch et. al. (2003), it is possible to include presuppositions in the description of the meaning of až, without separating its uses into a particle and a conjunction, like known from traditional grammar (cf. Russkaja Grammatika 1980), but already often criticized in the literature (cf. i.e. Levontina 1999). The role of the emotional component of meaning of až can be explained as a kind of concessive relation (cf. König 1991:633), which exists between the sentence with až and the sentence of the presupposition. The presentation will cover the following: Following a short overview of the theories for connectors and particles corresponding to the topic of research, we will discuss the lexico- graphical facts and problems of representing až (or its synonyms like prjam(o)) in Russian and Russian-German dictionaries. After defining až as a focusing particle, we will illustrate the application of the connector theory in the sense of Pasch et al. (2003) for different uses of až. We will focus on the stylistic specificity of až and its German equivalents: it leads to interactive effects in the sense of affecting the hearer (cf. Levontina 1999), producing more expressivity in neutral contexts through style contrast (cf. Chimik, 2004). The lexicographical portrait of až is incomplete without information on the degree of expressivity and the mode of its operation. Using theories about intensifying and maximising (cf. Arutjunova 1988, Van Os 1989, Rodionova 2005) we will discuss the possibility of a kind of invariant meaning like concessive adverbial connector’ for application in bilingual lexicography. References: Arutjunova, N.D. (1988): Tipy jazykovych zna enij: ocenka, sobytie, fakt. Moskva. Baranov, A.N., Plungjan, V.A., Rachilina, E.V. (1993): Putevoditel’ po diskursivnym slovam russkogo jazyka. Pomovskij i partnery. Moskva. Chimik, V.V. (2004): Predislovije. In: Chimik, V.V.: Bol’šoj slovar’ russkoj razgovornoj ekspressivnoj re i. Sankt- Peterburg, 5-11. 48 Dobrovol’skij, D.O. (2006): „Novyj bol’šoj nemecko-russkij eskaja koncepcija i prakti eskaja realizacija. In: Belentschikow, R. (ed.): Das Russische in zweisprachigen Wörterbüchern. Frankfurt am Main et.al., 133-142. König, E. (1991): Konzessive Konjunktionen. In: v. Stechow, A. Wunderlich, D. (eds.): Semantik. Semantics. Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung. An International Handbook of Contemporary Research. Berlin, New York, 631-639. Lang, E. (1989): Probleme der Beschreibung von Konjunktionen im allgemeinen einsprachigen Wörterbuch. In: Hausmann, F.-J., Reichmann, O., Wiegand, H.E., Zgusta, L. (eds.): Wörterbücher. Dictionaries. Dictionnaires. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Lexikographie. Berlin, New York, 862-868. Levontina, I. (1999): Russkoe až: polisemija i sinonimija. In: Anstatt, T., Meyer, R., Seitz, E. (eds.): Linguistische Beiträge zu Slavistik aus Deutschland und Österreich. VII. JungslavistInnen- Treffen Blaubeuren 1998. München, 217-228. Pasch, R., Brauße, U., Breindl, E., Waßner, U.H. (2003): Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren. Berlin, New York. Poljakova, S., Dobrovol’skij, D.O. (2005): Über Neuerungen und Kompromisse in der Lexikographie: Deutsch- Russisch. In: Bayer, M., Betsch, M., Zimny, R. (eds.): Beiträge der Europäischen Slavistischen Linguistik (POLYSLAV), Bd. 8. München, 150-158. Rodionova, S.E. (2005): Semantika intensivnosti i ee vyraženije v russkom jazyke. In: Bondarko, A.V. (ed.): Problemy funkcional’noj grammatiki. Polevyje struktury. Sankt-Peterburg, 150-168. Zybatow, L. (1990): Was die Partikeln bedeuten: Eine kontrastive Analyse Russisch – Deutsch. München. The Analysis of Speakers’ Errors in the Polish Dialog Corpus RABIEGA-W , JOANNA Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw (Poland) E-Mail:

The paper concerns the linguistic analysis of mistakes and errors found in the recordings of natural (spontaneous) spoken Polish dialogs. The basis for our research is the Polish corpus of dialogs collected within the LUNA – spoken Language UNderstanding in multilingual communication systems – project10. The general assumptions of collecting all LUNA corpora are described in Raymond et al. (2007). The other source for our investigation are remarks of A. Dister, who considered the influence of grammar mistakes, slips of the tongue or repetitions in French on the communication process (Dister 2008). In the paper we briefly present the process of collecting and transcribing the Polish dialogs. The analyzed corpus contains spontaneous dialogs recorded at Warsaw City Transportation Information Center in spring 2007. The domain chosen for recording conversations is public transport in Warsaw. There have been 500 dialogs selected for the project. We will introduce general rules of transcription, which were agreed by all the project partners (Rodriguez et al. 2007), as well as rules especially invented to cover some phenomena significant for spoken Polish, e. g. syllabifying words, mostly proper names (Mykowiecka et al. 2007). We distinguish several types of mistakes made by speakers of the recorded conversations: a. errors in pronunciation (e. g. confusion with Polish nasals; mispronunciation of proper names; incorrect pronunciation of foreign names); b. errors in inflection (e. g. confusion with the choice of appropriate inflectional suffix); c. errors in syntax (e. g. not realized, open clauses, mistakes in case government); d. repetitions and word truncations; e. neologisms. 10 www.ist-luna.eu (IST 33549). 49 All types of errors will be exemplified with the actual data taken from the corpus. The corpus has been annotated at the morpho-syntactic level, what also allows us to analyze the speakers’ mistakes in Polish syntax and inflection. The following table gives the primary statistics on the analyzed data concerning only the phenomena at the level of transcription: Number of occurrences Words in the corpus 75572 Foreign words 288 Pronunciation errors 2830 Unintelligible fragments 1050 Babbled sections 4583 Word truncation 4630 Our analysis results in two sets of information. First, we gain the statistical overview of mistakes of the defined types and the most common mispronunciations. Comparing these data to the statistics of the entire dialog corpus we know exactly how high the rate of errors is in the spoken texts. Second, we can build a systematic description of frequent mistakes and get a basis for future automatic speech errors detection and recognition. We believe that the collection of errors made by actual speakers will be useful in training process of a dialog system for Polish. References: Dister, A. (2008): L’autocorrection immédiate en français parlé: le cas des déterminants. To appear in: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Statistical Analysis of Textual Data, Lyon, France, 12–14 March 2008. Mykowiecka, A., Marasek, K., Marciniak, M., Gubrynowicz, R., Rabiega-Wi niewska, J. (2007): Annotation of Polish spoken dialogs in LUNA project. In: Human Language Technologies as a Challenge for Computer Science and Linguistics. Proceedings of 3rd Language & Technology Conference. October 5-7, 2007, Pozna , Poland. Raymond, Ch., Riccardi, G., Rodriguez, K.J., Rabiega-Wi niewska, J. (2007): The Luna corpus: an annotation scheme for a multi-domain multi-lingual dialogue corpus. In: Artstein, R., Vieu, L. (eds.): Decalog 2007: Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, Trento, Italy, 30 May – 1 June 2007. Trento, 185-186. Rodriguez, K.J., Dipper, S., Götze, M., Poesio, M., Riccardi, G., Raymond, Ch., Rabiega-Wi niewska, J. (2007): Standoff coordination for multi-tool annotation in a dialogue corpus. In: Proceedings of the Linguistic Annotation Workshop. Prague, 148-155. Towards a Typology of Inter-Slavic Language Contact RABUS, ACHIM University of Freiburg i. Br. (Germany) E-Mail:

In most Slavic languages, inter-Slavic language contact is an important phenomenon that has shaped their structure since the beginning of textual transmission up to the present day. While in the last years the Slavic-Nonslavic language contact has been extensively investigated through different methodological approaches (e.g. Bayer 2006, Pugh 1999), in the field of inter-Slavic language 50 In this paper, I would like to show – and this is my central hypothesis – that it is impossible to adequately grasp the structure of Slavic languages from a purely structuralistic viewpoint, i.e. without considering the transferences resulting from inter-Slavic language contact (cf. Stern/Voss 2006). This is valid both for standard languages and for dialects. However, since in dialect continua transferences are very hard to identify, I would rather focus on standard languages and on the relationship between transitional dialects and their Dachsprachen (cf. the methodological paradigm proposed by Auer 2005). Since lexical (for an overview cf. e.g. Moser 2004, for individual studies Bobran 1995) and sociolinguistic (cf. Marti/Nekvapil 2007, Lipowski 2005) issues have already been dealt with, I will concentrate on structural, especially morpho- syntactic transferences. They are indeed less frequent and less easily detectable than lexical borrowings; still, they are to be found to a varying extent in nearly all Slavic languages. In my talk, I will discuss examples of Slavic contact situations (Czech-Polish, Ruthenian, Serbian- Croatian-Slovenian), both in the present and in the past, so as to shed light on the emergence of structural transferences within this linguistic area. To do this, I adopt Thomason’s (2001) theoretical frame, in particular the notion of borrowing scale, adapting it to the Slavic situation: in fact, when applied to closely related languages, the borrowing scale is not unconditionally valid and has to be modified. Thus, the ultimate goal of this paper is to develop a preliminary panchronic typology of inter-Slavic language contact based on recent theoretical and methodological acquisitions on the subject (e.g. Berruto 2005, Hansen-Jaax 1995). References: Auer, P. (2005): Europe’s sociolinguistic unity, or: A typology of European dialect/standard constellations. In: Delbecque, N., van der Auwera, J., Geeraerts, D. (eds.): Perspectives on Variation. Sociolinguistic, Historical, Comparative. Berlin etc., 7-42. Bayer, M. (2006): Sprachkontakt deutsch-slavisch. Frankfurt am Main etc. Berruto, G. (2005): Dialect/standard convergence, mixing, and models of language contact: the case of Italy. In: Auer, P. et al. (ed.): Dialect change. Cambridge, 81-95. Besters-Dilger, J. (2005): Modalität im Sprachkontakt: Die ukrainische “Prosta mova” (2. Hälfte 16. Jh). In: Hansen, B., Karlík, P. (eds.): Modality in Slavonic Languages. New Perspectives. München, 239-258. Bobran, M. (ed.) (1995): Kontakty j zykowe polsko- skie. Rzeszów. : The typology of Inter-Slavic and Slavic-Nonslavic language contacts. In: Holzer, G. (ed.): Croatica – Slavica – Indoeuropaea. Wiener slavistisches Jahrbuch, Ergänzungsband VIII. Wien, 29-33. Hansen-Jaax, D. (1995): Transfer bei Diglossie. Hamburg. Lipowski, J. (2005): Konvergence a divergence eštiny a slovenštiny v eskoslovenském stát . Marti, R., Nekvapil, J. (eds.) (2007): Small and Large Slavic Languages in Contact. Berlin. Moser, M. (2004): Wechselbeziehungen zwischen slavischen Sprachen. In: Die Welt der Slaven, 49, 161-182. Pugh, S.M. (1999): Systems in Contact, System in Motion. Uppsala. Stern, D., Voss, C. (eds.) (2006): Marginal Linguistic Identities. Wiesbaden. Thomason, S.G. (2001): Language Contact. Edinburgh. 51 Influence of Extralinguistic Reality on Language on the Example of the Concept PORYADOK (Order) in Russian Socio-Political Discourse ROMANENKO, ALINA Moscow State University (Russia) E-Mail:

Extralinguistic reality is reflected by language and influences it. Concepts can change their meaning depending on changes in society, historical epoch, etc. They can even acquire opposite connotations. We aim to demonstrate this fact on the example of the concept PORYADOK order’. It always contains the presupposition of BESPORYADOK disorder’, the word is relevant only in situations when something is going wrong. We analyze the concept PORYADOK in Russian socio-political discourse due to the fact that Russia has been recently experiencing a time of changes that could have been reflected in language. We use the method of conceptual analysis to investigate the Russian base world view on the materials of dictionaries and compare the results with the material taken from the Russian discourse (the actual texts presented in the collection of the electronic database http://ruscorpora.ru). Combinability, associations and the metaphoric structure of the word PORYADOK show that although it is presented only with positive connotations in dictionaries, in Russian text-discourse it can become negative. Furthermore, we will explore similar concepts in other languages, such as German or Chinese. Being exaggerated in Soviet times, PORYADOK became opposed to freedom in the 90ies. This has lead to chaos in the life of people, who later started to value it again. The last president had built his politics on this fact –again we can observe a shift in the estimation of PORYADOK. More is Less and Less is More – Vowels, Features and Assimilations in Russian SALESCHUS, DIRK University of Konstanz (Germany) E.Mail:

There has been a long debate within Russian linguistics about whether the two surface vowels i and y should be considered as corresponding to two underlying vowels (this was first proposed by the so-called Leningrad approach), or as variants of one underlying vowel /i/, as argued in the so-called Moscow approach (a.o. Timberlake 2004, Padgett 2001). Arguments for the latter approach, assuming only five underlying vowels /a, e, i, o, u/, relied on the distribution of i and y. After secondarily palatalized (soft) consonants and word initially only i is found, whereas y is preceded by plain (non-palatalized) consonants and can never stand word initially. This generalization holds across morpheme boundaries and across word boundaries: (1) igrat’ (play-inf.ipf.) – sygrat’ (play-inf.pf.) (2) ivan (Ivan) – s yvanom (with Ivan) 52 The apparent acoustic and articulatory differences between both variants are assumed to be due to coarticulation with the preceding consonant (Halle 1971). Propopents of six underlying vowels /a, e, i, y, o, u/ argued that the acoustic and articulatory differences and words with initial y clearly point to two underlying vowels. However, the latter distributional exceptions were small in number and mainly from borrowings which weakened that counterargument (Gabka 1974). This study presents new arguments for a six vowel system based on the model of phonological underspecification and feature geometry as outlined in Lahiri/Evers (1991) and Lahiri/Reetz (2002), formulating explicit assumptions about the featural specification of Russian phonemes. Generalizations based on soft and hard consonants are reanalyzed as generalizations based on an opposition between coronal and dorsal vowels, holding both at synchronic and diachronic stages. The main result is that an increased vowel inventory leads to a decrease in the complexity of the Russian grammar and to a smaller and less redundant lexicon. The analysis relies on morphological and phonological considerations. The starting point is a reevaluation of the nature of secondary palatalization, as in the following examples: (3) voda (water-nom.sg.) – vod’e (water-prep.sg.) (4) kol’eno (knee-nom.sg) – kol’en’i (knee-nom.pl.) A unified treatment of that rule is offered with the assumption of two generalizations. First, not single sounds but natural classes of vowels have to be considered. The vowels /e/ and /i/ always pattern together as coronal vowels and trigger secondary palatalization of preceding consonants. They stand in opposition to the dorsal vowels /a, y, o, u/. Second, a simple phonological approach to secondary palatalization is formulated without any resort to morphology and morphophonological alternations. Since consonants are always softened when followed by coronal vowels, secondary palatalization does not need to be specified in the lexicon for these consonants. A natural, general and productive rule of regressive assimilation, whose domain is the morphological word, inserts the redundant values within and across morpheme boundaries. This economical approach with underspecified phonemes is not possible within a five vowel system. Finally, the proposed feature model is able to easily account for other phenomena like change of place palatalization, vowel reduction in stressless position and the special characteristics of hard sibilants. References: Gabka, K. (1974): Einführung in das Studium der russischen Sprache. Band 1: Phonetik und Phonologie. Leipzig. Halle, M. (1971): The Sound Pattern of Russian. The Hague, Paris. Lahiri, A., Evers, V. (1991): Palatalization and Coronality. In: Paradis, C., Prunet, J.-F. (eds.): Phonetics and Phonology. Volume 2. San Diego, 79-100. Lahiri, A., Reetz, H. (2002): Underspecified recognition. In: Gussenhoven, C., Werner, N., Rietveld, T. (eds.): Labphon 7. Berlin, 637-676. Padgett, J. (2001): Contrast dispersion and Russian palatalization. In: Hume, E. & Johnson, K. (eds.): The Role of Speech Perception in Phonology. New York, 187-218. Timberlake, A. (2004): A Reference Grammar of Russian. Cambridge. 53 Multiple Interference and Putative Innovations in Canadian Doukhobor Russian SCHAARSCHMIDT, GUNTER University of Victoria (Canada) E-Mail:

Currently, there are about 30,000 persons of Doukhobor descent living in Canada, mainly in the West Kootenay area of the province of British Columbia; roughly 60% still speak Doukhobor Russian (Tarasoff 2002:12; Schaarschmidt 1998:466). Outside British Columbia, there is a large settlement (actually the original settlement dating back to 1899) in the province of Saskatchewan (11,000) and there are Doukhobors living in the province of Alberta (3,000) as well as in California and Oregon (500). Between 1908 and 1913 the Community Doukhobors (appr. one half of the total population) moved from Saskatchewan to British Columbia. Ritual activities among the Doukhobors depend largely on orally transmitted prayers, psalms, and hymns that are based on Russian Church Slavonic; home life in those homes where Russian is still used is conducted in the 19th century South Russian dialect that the Doukhobors brought with them to Canada. A grammatical description of both the ritual language and the dialect must take into account the problem of multiple interference from Ukrainian, Canadian English, and, possibly Standard Russian (Schaarschmidt 2000). Methodologically, it is therefore imperative that any suspected interference phenomenon or innovation in Doukhobor Russian be seen in the light of the structure of the dialect before migration to Canada in 1899. Since the Doukhobors maintained an essentially oral tradition until the 1930s, there is little direct evidence for specific changes or innovations occurring in the first migrant generation. For this reason, the comparative method is the best way of mapping this period in the history of Doukhobor Russian (Bouquiaux/Thomas 1992). In addition, the transcribed versions of the psalms provide considerable evidence for identifying features that are not characteristic of the South Russian dialect. References: Bouquiaux, L., Thomas, J.M.C. (1992): Studying and Describing Unwritten Languages. Transl. by James Roberts. Dallas. Schaarschmidt, G. (1998): Language in British Columbia. In: Edwards, J. (ed.): Language in Canada. Cambridge, 461-468. Schaarschmidt, G. (2000): On Some Putative Syntactic Innovations in Canadian Doukhobor Russian. In: Linguistische Arbeitsberichte 74, 139-147. Tarasoff, K.J. (2002): Spirit Wrestlers: Doukhobor Pioneers’ Strategies for Living. Ottawa. 54 To the Reconstruction of Common Slavic Agricultural Terminology (* `threshing-floor`) SHALAEVA, TATIANA Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow (Russia) E-Mail:

Etymological studies have always been connected with the research on ethnic history and culture. Especially the importance of etymology has recently been appreciated in reconstructing ancient cultures, including Slavic ones (Benveniste, Trubachev). One of the most significant reconstructed spheres is agriculture which is studied by means of research on its terminology in the ancestral language of all Slavs. In this report I consider the problem of the origin of the Common Slavic term *to ‘threshing-floor’. According to the traditional treatment, this noun stems from the verb *tekti ‘to move’: running horses circle a device for grain threshing. Thus the meaning changes from *tekti ‘to move’ to * ‚place where something (somebody) is moving’ (Fasmer 4:70; Machek: 531). This noun is undoubtedly included in the family of the verb *tekti, but I would like to offer another semantic base for it. In Slavic languages (as obviously in other Indo-European languages) words with the initial meaning ‘movement of a liquid’ quite often develop the meaning ‘movement of dry substances’. For example, Rus. dial. vylit’ ‘to pour out’ (Krupu nado vylit’ iz meshochka), plavit’sya ‘to fall’ (Korzina neprochnaya okozalas’. Chernirtsa plavitsya iz neyo. Pesok iz-pod nog tak i plavitsya), tochit’ ‘to spill’ (Ne tochi psheno-to) Ukr. tekti ‘pour out (for sand, grain)’, Blr. tochitstsa id, Pol. zala , zalewa ‘to fill up (e.g. with coins)’. The derivative meaning from ‘pouring out’ is ‘falling of grain from a spike’. For example, Rus. dial. istekat’ ‘to fall (for grain in a spike)’, oplavit’sya id., Ukr. tekti id.; whence – Rus. tochok ‘heap of grain’, sol’ye ‘grain’, plavun ‘kind of flax with falling seeds’, tekun ‘kind of poppy with falling seeds’, Blr. tsekun id., Pol. ciekun id., Blr. ploushachki ‘siftings in grain threshing’, ploushy id. (cf. Lit. pla os id.). Probably * ‚threshing-floor’ is related to this group of words. Consequently, the initial meaning of this noun could be formulated as ‘place where grain is poured out’. References: Benveniste E. (1969): Le vocabulaire des institutins indo-europénnes. I-II. Paris. Fasmer M. (2003): Etimologicheskiy slovar’ russkogo yazyka. Perevod s nemetskogo i dopolneniya O.N. Trubacheva. Izdanie 4-e, stereotipnoe. Moskva. Machek V. (1957): Etymologický slovník jazyka eského a slovenského. Praha. Trubachev O.N. (2002): Etnogenez i kultura drevneyshih slavyan. Lingvisticheskiye issledovaniya. Moskva. 55 Partial Control in Polish Cannot Be an Instance of Agree SNARSKA, ANIA E-Mail:

While in the history of generative grammar the distinction between Obligatory Control and Nonobligatory Control has been high on the agenda for a long time, recently a fresh idea has been thrust into the limelight posing a real challenge to any theory of control (cf. Landau 2000). It has been proved that the relation between PRO and its controller is not always one of identity, i.e. the referent of PRO seems to include the antecedent along with the other individuals salient in the context (see(1)). Nowadays, one can observe a heated debate on whether control can be reduced to raising or is it best viewed as an instance of Agree. Landau (2000) asserts that the very fact of existence of PC is the deadliest blow to the Movement Theory of Control (MTC) as posited by Hornstein (1999, 2003). Why? The answer is obvious: there is no partial raising. A chunk of reference cannot be raised. This presentation shows, pace Bondaruk (2004), that the purported superiority of the Agree Theory of Control (ATC), postulated by Landau, is illusory in Polish. Ironically, it is the ATC that is plagued by a number of problems, both conceptual and empirical. It is proved that the existence of PC is not only innocuous to the MTC but also provides a strong argument in favor of it. As such, the MTC constitutes a viable alternative to the ATC. Finally, I introduce a new observation (corroborated by the results of a questionnaire) about PC into adjunct clauses, or rather its specific subspecies that I call Parasitic PC effects (PPCE). The PPCE arise once adjunct control is coupled with PC in a complement clause. In such cases a parasitic PC reading is available within the adjunct clause (see the underlined sentence in (2)).This effect, if real, can have far-reaching consequences for the selection of the appropriate theory of PC. Obviously, the ATC has a problem predicting that such a parasitic version of this effect should hold. The adjunct clause in (2), as an island, cannot be accessed by the matrix probe T. Thus, Landau treats adjunct control as a subspecies of NOC. To account for these facts, I propose a solution framed within the theory of control based on Move. Adapting insights in Rodrigues (2007), I suggest that the licensing of the PC effect depends on the presence of the projection of non-selected wollP (in the sense of Wurmbrand 2007) dominated by TP in the structure of the infinitive and the sideward movement of the DP controller from within the adjunct to the matrix. Crucially, the PC effect arises since the matrix controller originates in the adjunct clause as part of a complex DP which also contains a null associative plural pronoun (akin to an associative plural marker -tachi in Japanese, -men in Chinese or -ney in Korean) adjoined to the DP controller. The DP, leaving the adjunct clause (sideward movement) on its way to the complement clause, strands the collective pro in the scope of woll, thus giving rise to PC. Furthermore, the associative pro in the adjunct clause can be licensed by the unselected wollP only when this licensing is subject to confirmation on the same DP by a selected wollP in the complement clause. The DP controller in the complement clause forms another complex DP in Spec, vP and once again it leaves the null plural pronoun behind while it moves to Spec, TP, triggering another instance of PC. (1) Marek1 pro1 chce 1+ o 6-ej]. Mark told Mary that (he-Mark) wants REFL to-meet at 6 56 Mark told Mary that he wanted to meet at 6.’ (2) As new leader gang Peter called meeting in some strange place As a new leader of a gang Peter called a meeting is some strange place...’ Tak, Piotr chce nie w miejscu Yes, Peter wants REFL to-meet in old barn so as not to-gather REFL in place publicznym. public Yes, Peter wants to meet in the old barn so as not to gather in a public place.’ References: Bondaruk, A. (2004): PRO and Control in English, Irish and Polish: a Minimalist Analysis. Lublin. Hornstein, N. (1999): Movement and control. In: Linguistic Inquiry 30, 69-96. Hornstein, N. (2003): On control. In: Hendrick, R. (ed.): Minimalist Syntax. Oxford, 6-81. Landau, I. (2000): Elements of Control. Structure and Meaning in Infinitival Cconstructions. Dordrecht. Rodrigues, C. (2007): Agreement and Flotation in Partial and Inverse Partial Control Configurations. Ms. MIT, Cambridge/Massachusetts. Wurmbrand, S. (2007): Infinitives are tenseless. In: U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics. 13.1. A Survey of Russian Pronominal Lexemes Expressing Cause and Goal: Constructions and Pragmatics SOKOLOVA, SVETLANA University of Tromsoe (Norway) E-Mail:

Like many other languages, Russian has one major interrogative pronoun for expressing cause’ – pochemu why’, and one for expressing goal’ – zachem what for’. It is remarkable though that modern Russian is also characterized by a rich list of lexicalized pronominal forms referring to cause’ or goal’: k chemu, na chto, s chego, chego, chto. As a rule, the meaning of such lexemes is close to the meaning of one particular pronoun (either pochemu or zachem) and is defined in dictionaries by means of this pronoun (Shvedova/Belousova 1995, Kuznecov 2000). However, in case of the lexemes chto/chego we can observe an interesting variation of cause’ and goal’ meanings: Chto tak pozdno prishla? ( why’); Nu chto prishla? ( what for?’). From literature we know some more examples of neutralization between cause’ and goal’, cf.: Ja poexal v teatr, chtoby razvlech'sja/ tak kak xotel razvlech'sja (Arutjunova/Paducheva 1985:24). Also in actual speech the question Why P? can be answered with the goal construction and vice versa (Raxilina 1989:49- 54, Levontina 2006, Biagini 2007). All the facts mentioned above leave us with an impression that the boundary between cause and goal is rather vague and the means of expressing cause-goal meanings can be presented on a gradual scale. The main objective of this research is to introduce the criteria for distinguishing pronominal lexemes k chemu, na chto, s chego, chego, chto from traditional pronouns zachem and pochemu and thus to estimate the role of these lexemes in the system of 57 Russian pronouns. In this work we claim that the main difference between traditional pronouns and pronominal lexemes lies in their pragmatics. For instance, k chemu is usually used in contexts which not as much inquire about the goal of an action as they emphasize that the action is unnecessary and redundant: Kazalos' by, k chemu slova, etot vopros reshilsja by sam soboj... Moreover, the fact that pronominal lexemes are mainly used for pragmatic reasons is supported by the type of constructions in which they are used: they usually occur within nominative and infinitive sentences which are more expressive than the sentences of Subject+Predicate (finite form of the verb) type. Cf.: S chego vdrug takaja ljubov'? vs. ?Pochemu vdrug takaja ljubov'?; Zachem ty mne vresh? – *K chemu ty mne vresh'? (cf. K chemu vrat'?). Similar correlation between the pragmatics of an interrogative pronoun and the construction in which it is used can be observed in English in the use of pronoun why and the lexicalized expression how come with a close meaning. Unlike actual’ interrogative why, how come is rendered more like a statement where the speaker expresses surprise, and does not require inversion: Why are you late? vs. How come you are late? Thus, this work analyses the correlation between pragmatics and constructional grammar, gives further insight into the system of Russian pronouns and the cause- goal’ conceptual category. The main statements of this research will be supported by the data from the Russian National Corpus. References: Arutjunova N.D., Paducheva E.V. (1985): Istoki, problemy i kategorii pragmatiki. In: Novoe v zarubezhnoj lingvistike 16, 3-42. Biagini, F. (2007): Pochemu i Zachem v sovremennom russkom jazyke: prichina, motiv, cel'. In: Russkaja filologija 18, 171-176. Goldberg, A.E. (2006): Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalizations in Language. Oxford. Janda, L., Solovyev, V. (in press): What Constructional Profiles Reveal About Synonymy and Metaphor: A Case Study of Russian words for ‘sadness’. Submitted to: Cognitive Linguistics. Kuznecov, S.A. (2000): Bolshoj tolkovyj slovar' russkogo jazyka. Sankt-Peterburg. Levontina I.B. (2006): Ponjatie celi i semantika celevyx slov russkogo jazyka. In: Jazykovaja kartina mira i sistemnaja leksikografija. Moskva, 162-238. Prandi, M. (2004): The Building Blocks of Meaning. Amsterdam/Philadelphia. Raxilina E.V. (1989): Otnoshenie prichiny i celi v russkom tekste. In: Voprosy jazykoznanija 6, 49-54. Shvedova, N.Ju., Belousova, A.S. (1995): Sistema mestoimenij kak isxod stroenija jazyka i ego smyslovyx kategorij. Moskva. Parentheticals and the Inherent Dialogicity of Utterances SONNENHAUSER, BARBARA Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich (Germany) E-Mail:

The term ‘parenthetical’ is applied to phenomena ranging from words over phrases to clauses and sentences, (1), which share but one common feature – being used ‘parenthetically’: (1) a. $1 000 000 – NKRJa, 10-5-2007) b – - – […]. (Izvestija, 1-22-2008) c NKRJa, 2-17-2008) 58 d – – - (Vesti, 1-22-2008) It is not even quite clear what it means for an expression to be used parenthetically, since parentheticality is not a feature inherent to specific expressions. Even though some expressions are primarily used as parentheticals, (2), mostly one and the same expression can both be used parenthetically and integrated into the sentences structure, (3), (4): (2) a - , - NKRJa, 2-10-08) b , , NKRJa, 2-10-08) (3) a NKRJa, 2-18-2008) b NKRJa, 3-30-2008) (4) a – – Nezavisimaja gazeta, 1-23-2008) b modified by the author) Syntactically, it needs to be clarified how parentheticals are to be integrated into the sentence structure. Semantically, the question arises as to what kind of information is provided by them, and what the difference to the integrated use consists in. Facing these problems, Schwyzer (1939) proposes to regard parentheticals as one exponent of a more general linguistic phenomenon – without, however, pointing out what this might consist in. Regarding parentheticals as one complex sign composed of parenthetical, current utterance and non-actual utterances, the present paper proposes a semiotic approach based on Bachtins (2000) and Vološinovs (1993) conception of utterances as being inherently dialogical, and on Peirces conception of the indexical sign. Within an utterance, indices serve a double function: external indices establish a relation to the proposition’s situational object(s), internal indices establish an internal structure reflecting the structure of the situational object(s). The internal structure being disrupted by a parenthetical, an abductive reasoning process searches for an hypothesis accounting for that deviation. This explanatory hypothesis consists in regarding the parenthetical as an external index taking the rest of the utterance as object. The connection between both is established by the third relation constituting a sign in the Peircean sense: the interpretant, i.e. the effect in an interpreting mind. An indexical relation not only relates parenthetical and utterance, but also refers to former and future utterances to which the current utterance reacts. A semiotic analysis of parentheticals has several advantages: It provides a unified framework to account for the peculiarities of parentheticals and allows to classify parentheticals according to features characteristic of indices. Moreover, it allows to integrate former approaches which at first sight appear rather diverse (e.g. Hinrichs 1983, 1986; Grenoble 2004; Asher 2000). Finally, the general linguistic phenomenon Schwyzer (1939) alludes to can be taken to be the inherent dialogicity of linguistic signs and utterances. References: Asher, N. (2000): Truth conditional discourse semantics for parentheticals. In: Journal of Semantics 17, 31-59. 59 Bachtin, M.M. (2000): , S.G. (ed.): Michail Bachtin. Avtor i geroj. K filosofskim osnovam gumanitarnych nauk. Sankt-Peterburg, 249-298. Grenoble, L.A. (2004): Parentheticals in Russian. In: Journal of Pragmatics 36, 1953-1974. Hinrichs, U. (1983): Die sogenannten “Vvodnye Slova” (Schaltwörter/Modalwörter) im Russischen. Wiesbaden. Hinrichs, U. (1986): Die Parenthese im Slavischen. In: Olesch, R., Rothe, H. (eds.): Festschrift für Herbert Bräuer zum 65. Geburtstag. Köln, Wien, 125-143. Schwyzer, E. (1939): Die Parenthese im engeren und im weiteren Sinne. Berlin. Vološinov, V.N. (1993): Marksizm i filosofija jazyka: Osnovnye problemy sociologi jazyke. Moskva. Perspectives on the Slavic Aspect SPRINGFIELD TOMELLERI, VITTORIO DIPRI, University of Macerata (Italy) E-Mail:

Since its discovery in the early 19th century, the category of aspect (vid) in the Slavonic languages (further on Slavic-style aspect), expressed by means of prefixes and suffixes, has been an object of research and matter of discussion. The Slavic-type aspect can be defined as a system in which the grammatical opposition between Perfective and Imperfective is expressed by means of a closed set of affixes of adverbial or prepositional origin, carrying at the same time a lexical and a grammatical function, without temporal or modal restrictions. Recent typological approaches have clearly shown the rather idiosyncratic, derivational-like character of the Slavic- style aspect, which cross-linguistically seems to be quite infrequent. There are, however, some languages in Eastern Europe and in the Caucasus having a quite similar behaviour in the expression of aspectual and/or actional values. These languages (e.g., Lithuanian, Hungarian, Yiddish, Ossetic, Georgian) deserve particular attention not only from general linguists, but also from slavicists. Indeed, the Slavic aspect has been often taken as the starting point for the definition and description of the category: every time it was found in other languages, a comparison to the Slavic was self-evident. Comrie and Lindsted, for example, have proposed to put the different languages on a scala, according to the more or less grammatical character of the category. However, this scala can also be used in order to detect, explain and reconstruct stages of development, which are not clearly attested in the Slavic languages. This is the aim of my paper: taking some examples from two languages spoken in the Caucasus area, Georgian (Kartvelian group of the Caucasian languages) and Ossetic (Iranic group of the Indoeuropean phylum), we want to discuss some relevant aspects of the Slavic aspect from a typological and historical point of view. The genesis and development of the aspect in the Slavonic languages can be better understood by taking into account the data from other languages, located on a different position along the grammaticalization scala. One of the most discussed questions in the historical aspectology concerns the genesis of the aspect in Slavic: which morphological process was responsible for the development of this grammatical category? The comparison with other aspectual systems points to the fact that prefixation should be considered the most important factor, triggering the development of the Slavic-type aspect. A semantic comparison of the aspectual opposition in different languages, outside of the Slavic language family, allows us to find out which strategies of expressing aspectual opposition are used by more or less developed aspectual systems, giving pretious 60 insighs into the grammaticalization processes, which can hardly be documented because of the absence of formal change in the developments of the preverbs from lexical to grammatical items. This research aims at being a contribution to the study and discussion of a phenomenon, which is peculiar to the Slavic languages, but can be maybe better observed from another, broader perspective. In the paper, different grammaticalisation parameters of the Slavic-type aspect and interesting correlation will be presented and discussed. The Nature of Homophones STERIOPOLO, OLGA University of British Columbia (Canada) E-Mail:

In this paper, I investigate the nature of homophones. It has been traditionally assumed that homophones are linguistic objects that sound the same, but differ in meaning (Mogg et al. 1994, Timberlake 2004, Townsend 1975, Wade 2000, etc.). I claim that the traditional accounts are missing an ingredient. I will show that homophones differ not only in meaning, but also in syntactic structure, leaving just the sound the same. This work is a case study of Russian non-root homophones (suffixes and prefixes). In Russian, there are sets of suffixes (-ec, -ic, -iš ’, -k, -ik, -ok) and prefixes (po-, pro-) which systematically differ in distributional properties. For example, the suffix -iš ’ place/site’ can change the gender of the base form, while its homophonous counterpart -iš ’ big’ can never change the gender of the base (1)-(2). With this respect, the following question arises: If homophones differ only in meaning, as the traditional accounts claim, how can we account for the fact that their distributional properties are also different? (1) a. požár b. požár’-iš ’-e fire.N.SG (MASC) fire-PLACE/SITE-N.SG (NEUT) ‘fire’ ‘site of fire’ (2) -iš ’-e person.N.SG (MASC) person-BIG-N.SG (MASC) ‘person’ ‘big person’ I propose that non-root homophones systematically differ in both meaning and syntactic structure. For example, out of two non-root homophones, one is structurally a head, while the other one is structurally a modifier. According to Bierwisch (2003), Schütze (1995), and Bachrach/Wagner (2007), heads project, thus they determine categorial properties of the output. Modifiers do not project, thus they do not determine categorial properties of the output. In (1), the suffix -iš ’ place/site’ determines the gender of the output, which is consistent with its status as a syntactic head (3a). In (2), the homophonous suffix -iš ’ big’ cannot determine the gender of the output, which is consistent with its status as a syntactic modifier (3b). 61 (3) a. n2[neut] b. n[masc] n2[neut] n1[masc] -iš ’ ‘big’ n[masc] -iš ’ ‘site’ n1[masc] žar ‘fire’ n[masc] ’elovek ‘person’ Russian non-root homophones differ not only in meaning, but also in syntactic structure, as illustrated in the table below. The following questions arise: First, is this property language- specific, as in Russian, or is it universally true? Second, is this a special property of non-root homophones or is it also true for root homophones? Non-root homophones Meaning different Structure different Sound same References: Bachrach, A., Wagner, M. (2007): Syntactically driven cyclicity vs. output-output correspondence: The case of adjunction in diminutive morphology. In: Proceedings of the 30th Penn Linguistics Colloquium. Bierwisch, M. (2003): Heads, complements, adjuncts: Projection and saturation. In: Lang, E., Maienborn, C., Fabricius-Hansen, C. (eds.): Modifying Adjuncts. Berlin, New York, 113-159. Mogg, K. et al. (1994). Interpretation of homophones related to threat: Anxiety or response bias effects? In: Cognitive Therapy and Research 18 (5), 461-477. Townsend, W.C. (1975): A Handbook of Homophones of General American English. Waxhaw. Schütze, C. (1995): PP attachment and argumenthood. In: Papers on Language Processing and Acquisition. MITWPL Working Papers in Linguistics 26, 95-151. Timberlake, A. (2004): A Reference Grammar of Russian. Cambridge. Wade, T. (2000): A Comprehensive Russian Grammar. Oxford, Cambridge. Developing a Lexicographic and Publishing Platform for the Serbian Language TASOVAC, TOMA Princeton University (USA) E-Mail:

The experience of foreign language teaching has shown that a significant number of students never manage to increase their spoken and written fluency beyond the intermediate level, despite taking intermediate and advanced courses.11 Reading authentic, unabridged, and “difficult” literary texts can be extremely frustrating if the student lacks the vocabulary or sufficient knowledge of complex syntactic structures and cultural references. Reading simplified, abridged 11 Felicity O’Dell, Teaching advanced learners, http://uk.cambridge.org/elt/teachers/youngadult/articles.htm. 62 versions of literary works, on the other hand, is often an insult to the student’s intelligence.12 Annotated editions of authentic literary texts written in the Serbian language, which are easily available on the Internet, would greatly improve and enrich the learning process of Serbian as a foreign language, while possibly attracting a larger number of students to the study of South Slavic literatures and cultures. The author describes a scalable, web-based, digital platform for publishing annotated, fully-glossed study editions of literary works in the Serbian language through the use of non- proprietary formats and interoperable standards such as XML13, TEI14 and Unicode15, together with an integrated, collaborative, WordNet-based16 bilingualized Serbian-English dictionary. The integrated approach to textual and lexicographic production provides a set of tools for intermediate or advanced students, which facilitate reading, comprehension and discussion of authentic literary texts while encouraging students to become producers of knowledge in a global learning network. The publishing platform allows editors to work with XML documents and establish links between individual words in a text and corresponding dictionary entries. At the same time, the editing process is rooted in the lexico-semantic approach to language learning by stressing the importance of units larger than the single word (polywords, fixed and free collocations, institutionalized expressions etc.). When published (through the use of XSL and CSS stylesheets) as valid HTML documents viewable in standards-compliant web browsers, texts contain two types of glosses: direct dictionary glosses, which are stored centrally in the dictionary database, and annotations, which are text-specific. Both are easily available to the user with a familiar interface method of clicking on individual words (see Fig. 1) and altclicking on highlighted phrases (see Fig. 2). Although based on the English WordNet, the proposed lexicographic platform extends the Serbian-English semantic ontology by providing methods of encoding a host of important lexicographic properties which are aimed primarily at foreign students: detailed grammatical information, full accented declensions and conjugations, usage labels (dialectological, temporal, functional), and, when appropriate, stylistic distinction among members of a single synset. At the same time, however, the dictionary – like any WordNet-based semantic database – serves as a platform for exploring semantic relations between words and their senses (synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, hyperonyms etc.) The modular project architecture will allow further extensions such as introduction of etymologies, morphogenetic representations of lexical meaning (i.e. morphosemantic links between dictionary entries based on their constitutive roots), valency frames, visualizations of semantic hierarchies and so forth. 12 See also Gillian Lazar, Literature and Language Teaching, Cambridge 1993; Widdowson, H. Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature, Longman 1975. 13 http://www.w3.org/XML/. 14 http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5/. 15 http://unicode.org/. 16 http://wordnet.princeton.edu/. 63 Fig 1: A single-click on a word shows the dictionary gloss: Fig.2: Annotated phrases are highlighted when the mouse goes over them: Alt-clicking an annotated phrase displays the annotation: 64 Russian Women’s High Involvement Conflict Style THIELEMANN, NADINE University of Potsdam (Germany) E-Mail:

The paper analyses the highly competitive conflict style of Russian women based on a corpus of casual conversations. Conflict style captures the socially meaningful performance of the conversational activities of disagreeing and arguing embedded in the conversational genre of oppositional argument (Schiffrin 1985). Dissensions convey a speaker’s “oppositional stance (verbal or non-verbal) to an antecedent verbal (or non-verbal) action” (Kakava 1993:36). Any action that expresses the non-acceptance of a turn and elicits further negotiations in the form of arguments can be defined as dissension. Non-acceptance of a prior turn can refer to the form of the utterance, the speech act in the turn, the truth of the proposition or to the relevance of the utterance. Culture as well as gender may predispose speakers to a specific conflict style (Kakava 2001). Conflict styles are constrained by and reflect culture- and group-specific evaluations of risk, aggression, emotional involvement, etc. (cf. Schiffrin 1984, Tannen 1998). Style functions as a complex contextualization cue (Selting 1995) indexing social identity (Kallmeyer 1995) or modes of interaction etc. Interactional stylistic conceives style as a holistic gestalt constituted by several devices on each level of interaction (Selting 1997, 2001). So the main question will be: What performances of dissensions contextualize the competitive mode of arguing? The following features of dissensions on different levels of interaction contribute to the expression of speaker’s and the creation of listener’s involvement: 1.) On the level of conversational organisation (turn taking, preference): Tying techniques such as wording or format tying (Goodwin 1990, Schwitalla 2002, Kotthoff 1993) mark cohesion between adjacent dissent turns. Often dissensions are realised as interruptions, placed in overlap or simultaneously. Furthermore dissensions show a preferred turn design – the preference shifts to dissension. These features are typical of a more aggressive mode of conflict talk (cf. Kotthoff 1993, Gruber 1998). 2.) On the propositional level: Speakers enhance polarity between dissent turns. Strong adversative or contrastive relations are common (contradiction, rejection, irrelevance). These can additionally be strengthened and stressed by the use of discourse markers (net) or epistemic particles (že). 3.) On the level of action: Non-acceptance is often conveyed by challenging speech acts such as relevance questions, irrelevancy claims, rhetorical questions or strong contrastive assertions. Perpetuated strong dissensions build insisting sequences that convey sustained disagreement and prevent topical progression as well as the continuation of action completely blocking any negotiation. The analysed Russian women’s preference to use these dissension techniques reveals an attitude of agonism defined by Leung (2005:13) as “conventionalized aggression or being combative for the sake of it”. They seem to enjoy conflict at the same time not perceiving it as a threat to their relationships or as an expression of genuine aggression. This is rather untypical of female conflict behaviour (cf. Tannen 1998), and so far has been described as characteristic of other mainly ethnically or socially defined speech communities (e.g. Schiffrin 1984, Blum- Kulka/Blondheim/Hacohen 2001, Kakava 2002). This once more underlines the importance of sociolinguistic fieldwork for genderlinguistic analyses. 65 Examples (1) marked cohesion by wording, contradiction placed in overlap 1 [L1:] prepodavala ukrainskuju literaturu v škole on 3I:[ 4 normal’no? oni [sovremennye avtory 6 L1: [ 7 17yj potom chodili OTKOPALI ponimaete? prosto dostali iz glubi (2) marked cohesion by wording, epistemically strengthened contradiction (“že”) prefaced by vy ne 2 videli 3S: e videli [kak 4 Z : [my videli my videli 5 krasivo i pošla (3) preferred turn design, dissension by challenging question 1 Se: a esli A ESLI muž fermer? on vsegda 3 Ju: =kak on možet postojanno sidet’ doma? nu esli on zanimaetsja 4 rabotoj sel’skim chozjajstvom on kak raz i ne SIDIT ( ) References: Blum-Kulka, S., Blomdheim, M., Hacohen, G. (2002): Traditions of dispute: from negations of Talmudic texts to the arena of political discourse in the media. In: Journal of Pragmatics 34, 1569-1594. Goodwin, M. (1990): he-said-she-said. Talk as social organization among black children. Indianapolis. Gruber, H. (1998): Disagreeing: Sequential placement and internal structure of disagreements in conflict episodes. In: Text 18/4, 467-503. Kakava, Ch. (1993): Negotiation of Disagreement by Greeks in Conversations and Classroom Discourse. Unpublished dissertation, Georgetown University Washington D.C. Kakava, Ch. (2001): Discourse and Conflict. In: Schiffrin, D., Tannen, D., Hamilton, H. (eds.): Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford, 650-671. Kakava, Ch. (2002): Opposition in modern Greek discourse. Cultural and contextual constraints. In: Journal of Pragmatics 34, 1537-1568. Kallmeyer, W. (1995): Zur Darstellung von kommunikativem sozialem Stil in soziolinguistischen Gruppenporträts. In: Keim, I. (ed.) (1995): Kommunikation in der Stadt 3. Berlin, New York, 1-25. Kotthoff, H. (1993): Disagreement and concession in disputes. On the context sensivity of preference structures. In: Language in Society 22, 193-216. Leung, S. (2005): Conflict Talk: a discourse analytical approach. In: Working Papers in TESOL & Applied Linguistics Vol. 5/1. [http://www.tc.columbia.edu/academic/tesol/Webjournal/LeungFinal.doc.pdf, download 19.1.2006] Schiffrin, D. (1984): Jewish argument as sociability. In: Language in Society 13, 311-335. Schiffrin, D. (1985): Everyday argument: The organization of diversity in talk. In: van Dijk, T. (ed.): Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Vol. 3: Discourse and Dialogue. London, 35-46. 66 Schwitalla, J. (2002): Kohäsion statt Kohärenz. Bedeutungsverschiebungen nach dem Sprecherwechsel – vornehmlich in Streitgesprächen. In: Deppermann, A., Spranz-Fogasy, Th. (eds.): be-deuten. Wie Bedeutung im Gespräch entsteht. Tübingen, 106-119. Selting, M. (1995): Stil als Kontextualisierungshinweis. In: Stickl, G. (ed.): Stilfragen. Berlin, New York, 225-257. Selting, M. (1997): Interaktionale Stilistik: Methodologische Aspekte zur Analyse von Sprechstilen. In: Selting, M., Sandig, B. (eds.): Sprech- und Gesprächsstile. Berlin, New York, 9-43. Selting, M. (2001): Stil – in interaktionaler Perspektive. In: Jakobs, E.M., Rothkegel, A. (eds.): Perspektiven auf Stil. Tübingen, 3-20. Tannen, D. (1998): The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue. New York. Argument and Adjunct Nominals in Polish: Syntax, Semantics, Lexical Licensing T , BEATA University of Tübingen (Germany) E-Mail:

Polish noun phrases (NPs) typically occur in syntactic structures as subjects and objects. However, genitive, dative, accusative and instrumental NPs can also occur as adjuncts (Szober, 1969, Urba czyk, 1978). An overview of morphological cases in Polish in the context of marking argument NPs (ArgNPs) and adjunct NPs (AdjNPs) is provided in (1). Whereas the licensing of nominative-, locative- and vocative-marked NPs does not cause any problems for grammatical theories and is rather unspectacular due to the compatibility of their syntactico-semantic features in each syntactic context in which these NPs may occur, an adequate and particularly non-redundant modeling of genitive-, dative-, accusative-, and instrumental-marked nouns seems more challenging. Previous approaches to these NPs used as AdjNPs focus particularly on the aspects of case assignment. Emonds (1976), Bresnan and Grimshaw (1978) and McCawley (1988) treat AdjNPs as being embedded in a prepositional phrase headed by a null preposition assigning case to those NPs. Larson (1985) argues against such a position, assuming that AdjNPs are bare NPs headed by nouns which bear the case assigning feature specification [+F]. Jaworska (1986) suggests that English AdjNPs have no case at all. For Polish AdjNPs, she assumes a specification of the form [CASE, INST], [CASE, GEN], and [CASE, ACC] in the lexical entry of each noun that can head an AdjNP. This strategy, however, leads to redundancies in the lexicon. Kasper (1997) discusses semantico-combinatorial aspects of AdjNPs versus ArgNPs. The essential idea of his proposal is to distinguish the inherent meaning of a word or phrase from its uses in different constructions. According to this theory, the inherent meaning of a noun heading an AdjNP is on par with the inherent meaning of this noun when used in an ArgNP. However, we will show that ArgNPs and the corresponding AdjNPs differ in their selectional restrictions and, hence, cannot have the same inherent meaning. In this paper, we examine a range of AdjNPs with respect to determination and quantification, modification, pluralization and referentiality. The objective is to specify a set of syntactic and semantic properties that AdjNPs share with ArgNPs, and to determine properties that AdjNPs provide in contrast to ArgNPs. The results of the applied tests are presented in (2). Given these results, the generalization can be made that Polish AdjNPs share syntactic features and the property of referentiality with the corresponding ArgNPs but differ from them in selectional properties. 67 Based on these empirical generalizations, we propose a constraint-based analysis implemented in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard/Sag 1994). The proposed analysis applies lexical and phrasal implicational constraints which (i) license nouns heading ArgNPs and AdjNPs, (ii) account for the syntactic and semantic selection, and (iii) ensure the right percolation of semantic information along the complex structures. Our strictly lexicalist analysis enables the modeling of both ArgNPs and AdjNPs without the need for introducing lexical rules or extending the standard framework and without any redundancies in the lexicon. (1) An overview of morph. cases in Polish in the context of marking ArgNPs and AdjNPs ArgNPs AdjNPs Jan Nom. Jan is_sleeping. none Jan is sleeping.’ . tej nocy. Gen. Maria demanded money. Jan left this night Maria demanded the money.’ Jan left that night.’ rodzicom. Janowi piwo. Dat. Piotr dedicated his thesis parents. Maria drank John beer Piotr dedicated his thesis to his parents.’ Maria drank John's beer.’ . godzin . Acc. Jan saw Maria. Maria was crying whole hour. Jan saw Maria.’ Maria was crying for a whole hour.’ Jan pos u y si no em. Piotr uciek lasem. Inst. Jan used RM knife. Piotr escaped forest. Jan used a knife.’ Piotr escaped through the forest.’ Jan jest teraz w szkole. Loc. Jan is now in school. none Jan is in school now.’ Mamo, poczekaj! Voc. mama wait none (2) Summary of the results of tests applied to Polish AdjNPs 68 References: Bresnan, J.W., Grimshaw, J. (1978): The Syntax of Free Relatives in English. In: Linguistic Inquiry 9, 331-391. Emonds, J.E. (1976): A Transformational Approach to English Syntax: Root, Structure-preserving, and Local Transformations. New York. Jaworska, E. (1986): Aspects of the Syntax of Prepositions and Prepositional Phrases in English and Polish. Ph.D. thesis, University of Oxford. Kasper, R. (1997): Semantics of Recursive Modification. Unpublished manuscript. Larson, R.K. (1985): Bare NP-Adverbs. In: Linguistic Inquiry 16, 595-621. McCawley, J.D. (1988): Adverbial NPs: Bare or Clad in See-Through Garb? In: Language 64, 583-590. Pollard, C.J., Sag, I.A. (1994): Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Chicago. Szober, St. (1969): Gramatyka j zyka polskiego. Warszawa. Urba (ed.). (1978): Encyklopedia wiedzy o j zyku polskim. Wroc aw, Warszawa, Kraków, Gda sk. The Puzzle of Two Terms for Red in Czech UUSKÜLA, MARI University of Tartu (Estonia) E-Mail:

In their famous and much discussed monograph Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution Brent Berlin and Paul Kay claimed that for any language the maximum number of basic colour terms is universally 11 (black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, grey, purple, pink, and orange). However, Berlin and Kay challenged their own theory by conceding that Russian and Hungarian as an exception possess 12 basic colour terms. According to them Russian has two basic blues – sinij and goluboj (see Paramei 2005 for doubts and discussion) – and Hungarian has two basic terms for red – piros and vörös. In Schmiedtová (2002, 2006) as well as some other researchers (Nagel 2000) have suggested that the Czech language might also possess 12 basic colour terms, including two basic terms for red – rudý and ervený. However, they did not carry out any empirical research. In March 2007 fifty-two native speakers of Czech were interviewed in Brno and Prague, Czech Republic. The data was collected by using the field method of Ian Davies and Greville Corbett (1994, 1995), as been developed by Urmas Sutrop (2001, 2002) and consists of two tasks: a colour-name list task and the colour naming task, where 65 coloured tiles were used as stimuli. The colour seeing ability was accessed by The City University Color Vision Test (Fletcher 1980). The aim of this article is to show that there are exactly 11 basic colour terms in Czech. One term for red – ervený – is basic, whereas the other term – rudý – is not. The full technical results have been provided in Uusküla (2008). In the list task three parameters are viewed – the naming frequency of a word, its mean position, and its cognitive salience index computed from the first two parameters. 45 subjects of the 52 named the colour word ervený, while only 9 of the 52 named rudý. Moreover, the mean position of the term ervený was the highest, while the colour name rudý was only 24th in the sequence on average. In the colour naming task 52 subjects named 7 colour tiles with the word ervený on 100 occasions and three colour tiles with the colour word rudý only on 3 occasions (actually there was only one subject, a 63-years-old journalist who referred to those colour tiles as being rudý). 69 The puzzle of two terms for red in Czech – the basic ervený and non-basic rudý – presents a semantic question and has nothing to do with the theory of basic colour terms. The phenomenon should rather be interpreted taking into account distinct connotations and collocations as well as positive and negative emotional associations. In addition it is ventured that the phenomenon, rare as it is, might be areal, because a similar use of two terms for red can also be found in the Hungarian language. It would be reasonable to develop further the concept of cultural basicness introduced by Galina Paramei (2005), which adapts relatively easily to Hungarian and Czech. References: Berlin, B., Kay, P. (1969): Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley. Davies, I., Corbett, G. (1994): The basic color terms of Russian. In: Linguistics 32, 65-89. Davies, I., Corbett, G. (1995): A practical field method for identifying basic colour terms. In: Languages of the World 9 (1), 25-36. Fletcher, R. (1980): The City University Colour Vision Test. 2nd ed. London. MacLaury, R.E., Almási, J., Kövecses, Z. (1997): Hungarian piros and vörös: color from points of view. In: Semiotica. 114 (1/2), 67-81. Nagel, S. (2000): Zur Semantik der Grundfarbadjektive im Russischen und Tschechischen. München. Unpublished MA thesis. http://www.cis.unimuenchen.de/~wastl/pub/magister.html Paramei, G.V. (2005): Singing the Russian blues: an argument for culturally basic color terms. In: Cross-Cultural Research 39 (1), 10-34. Schmiedtová, V., Schmiedtová, B. (2002): The color spectrum in language: the case of Czech. Cognitive concepts, new idioms, and lexical meanings. In: Gottlieb, H., Mogensen, J.E., Zettersten, A. (eds.): Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Lexicography, University of Copenhagen May 4-6, 2000. Tübingen, 285- 292. Schmiedtová, V., Schmiedtová, B. (2006): : Blatná, R. (eds.): Korpusová lingvistika: stav a modelové p ístupy. Praha, 285-313. Sutrop, U. (2001): List task and a cognitive salience index. In: Field Methods 13 (3), 263-276. Sutrop, U. (2002): The Vocabulary of Sense Perception in Estonian: Structure and History. Frankfurt am Main et al. Uusküla, M. (2008): The basic colour terms of Czech. In: Trames 12 (1), 3-28. Uusküla, M., Sutrop, U. (2007): Preliminary study of basic colour terms in modern Hungarian. In: Linguistica Uralica 43 (2), 102-123. Dialect Contact in the Czech Republic: Do Moravians in Prague Really Speak Common Czech? WILSON, JAMES University of Sheffield E-Mail:

This paper reports on the linguistic behaviour of a group of Moravian migrants (from the east of the Czech Republic) living in Prague, Bohemia (the western half of the Czech Republic). The results are based on a sociolinguistic analysis of 37 university students from different parts of Moravia living at a hall of residence in Prague. Although no systematic empirical research has been carried out on dialect contact in the Czech Republic, it is assumed by some linguists that speakers of Moravian dialects living in Bohemia quickly start to drop or avoid marked features of their native dialects and accommodate to the local variety, Common Czech (CC). This assumption, formulated by linguists who believe 70 CC is assuming the role of a national vernacular, forms part of what I term the ‘contact hypothesis’. According to this hypothesis, Moravians moving to Bohemia quickly assimilate CC, while migration in the opposite direction supposedly facilitates the diffusion of CC forms beyond Bohemia (Sgall/Hronek 1992). The contact hypothesis is based on the subjective evaluation of the varieties of Czech, their role and function. First – according to linguists who formulated the ‘contact hypothesis’ – Standard Czech (SC) is an artificially imposed and primarily nonspoken variety that has no native speakers and is rarely used in informal communication. Second, Moravian dialects are highly localized and stigmatized in Bohemia as markers of provincialism. Finally, CC, although non- standard, is a semiprestigious koine that is socially unmarked throughout Bohemia and parts of western Moravia and it is spoken as a mother-tongue variety with minimal variation by approximately 65 percent of the Czech population. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly widespread in (semi-) formal communicative situations where it is supplanting SC. Thus, in view of the above, it is predicted that Moravians living in Bohemia usually attempt – with varying degrees of success – to speak CC. The present study is the first attempt to systematically describe the results of dialect contact between speakers of CC and Moravian dialects and to test the ‘contact hypothesis’; to my knowledge, it is the first systematic variationist account of language variation in the Czech Republic. The study combines a quantitative analysis of six linguistic variables with both qualitative and ethnographic research and it identifies to what extent speakers of Moravian dialects living in Prague assimilate CC forms, what route their accommodation takes, and which variants of the host variety are most likely to be acquired or rejected. The primary aim of this presentation is to assess and describe the impact of a set of independent social variables on informants’ assimilation of CC forms. Special attention is accorded to speakers’ sex, region of origin, length of residence in the host community and network integration. References: Sgall, P., Hronek, J. (1992): . Prague. Spatial Meanings of the English Verb-Particle out and the Russian Prefix vy- in Verbs of Motion ZAGREBELNAYA, MARIA Moscow City Pedagogical University (Russia) E-Mail:

Our research is based on a set of schemas worked out by S. Lindner (1981) for the verb particle (Vp) out. We have used the same approach for the Russian prefix vy- in order to compare the semantics of space expressed by both out and vy-. Both verbal modifiers denote outward movement from one space (container) into another. In the research the containers (spaces) were grouped by physical conditions: house and street, water and land, rain, darkness, light, forest and parts of one space. What remains unclear is the relation between the two spaces in terms of their closeness and openness. We hypothesize that in Russian and English languages in the situation of leaving one space and entering another the first space (S1) is a container and thus is more closed, 71 whereas the second space (S2) is more open. This condition stipulates the usage of Vp out and prefix vy-. (1) Karen ran out of the laboratory and along the corridor to the shower room. (2) Karen vybezhala iz laboratorii po koridoru v vannuyu. (3) Apply a sunscreen before you go out into the sunlight. (4) Pered vyxodom na solntse nanosite solntsezashitniy krem. (5) He went out into a meadow. (6) On vyshel v lug. Transformation of locatives was used as a research method for the data and showed that the change of S1 and S2 is subject to structural restrictions of the language: (7) He ran out of the flat into the room. – On vybezhal iz kvartiry v komnatu. (8) He sailed out of the sea into the river. – On vyplyl iz morya v reku. (9) The mouse ran out of the room into the box. (10) Myshka vybezhala iz komnaty v korobku. What we have found is that the spatial meanings of the verbal modifiers are generally similar except for the case when the space is divided into subspaces by the speaker. In this case the subspaces follow the same scheme in Russian and thus the prefix vy- is used, whereas in English subspaces are viewed as two different containers and Vp out is not relevant: (11) Futbolist vyshel na seredinu polya. (12) The soccer player went to midfield. References: Dobruchina, E., Paillard, D. (2001): Russkie pristavki: mnogoznachnost’ i semanticheskoe edinstvo. Moskva. Krongauz, M. (1998): Pristavki i glagoly v russkom jazyke: semanticheskaya grammatika. Moskva. Maliar, T., Seliverstova, O. (1998): Prostranstvenno-distantsionnye predlogi i narechiya v russkom i angliyskom yazykah. München. Plag, I. (2003): Word-Formation in English. Cambridge. Svetsinskaya, I. (1997): Nekotorye aspekty metodiki issledovaniya russkix pristavochnyx glagolov (na primere glagolov s pristavkoy vy-). In: Glagol’naya prefiksatsiya v russkom jazyke. Moskva, 149-163. 72 zyka polskiego (The Great Polish Dictionary) – The Conception and Methods of Preparation MIGRODZKI, PIOTR and PRZYBYLSKA, RENATA Polish Academy of Sciences, Cracow (Poland) E-Mails:

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The aim of the paper is to present a huge lexicographic work carried out in Poland currently, i.e. The Great Polish Dictionary (Wie zyka polskiego – WSJP). There are two major purposes of this undertaking: 1) to give exhaustive description of all lexical units of Polish, from the end of the Second World War till now; 2) to apply great achievements of modern Polish theoretical linguistics (particularly semantics and grammar) to make an effective, adequate and user-friendly lexicographic description. The dictionary will be available only in electronic version (probably on the Internet) and electronically prepared by linguists from the Institute of Polish Language of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow, in cooperation with contributors from other Polish research centers. The project is supported by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education in 2007-2012. Our presentation consists of the following parts: 1) theoretical framework of the dictionary; 2) the advantages of the electronic method of preparation; 3) an outline of the macro- and microstructure of the dictionary; 4) preliminary information about the structure of the dictionary database and user interface; 5) the schedule of the project and perspectives for the future. 73 Imagining Stagnation: the Twighlight of the Soviet Union in Contemporary Russian Cinema BOELE, OTTO University of Leiden (The Netherlands) E-Mail:

The last five years have seen a growing interest in the “long 1970s”, not only as an object of nostalgia, but also as a point of reference for interpreting the political situation in contemporary Russia. Drawing parallels between Putin’s reign and the era of “stagnation” under Leonid Brezhnev has become a common place, especially among members of the political opposition. Although the legitimacy of such parallels is occasionally questioned, most political and social scientists agree that the 1970s loom large in Russian’s social consciousness. According to the editors of the journal Neprikosnovennyi zapas, which recently devoted a separate issue to the Brezhnev era, the 1970s even have become the “main instrument for legitimizing the present state of affairs in Russia”. Given this striking interest in and reappraisal of the 1970s during the Putin administration, the question arises how this has affected the depiction of the Brezhnev era, and particularly its byt, in TV-series and contemporary cinema. Does the viewer still get any idea of the dreariness of everyday life with which the “long 1970s” became associated in the late 1980s and early 1990s? Are TV makers capable of evoking a sense of “timelessness” or “eternity”, which many people remember as one of the era’s defining features, or do these directors and screenplay writers present a world that is clearly destined to disappear? While there is an impressive number of drama series that are situated in the stagnation era, in this paper I will confine myself to four films that purport to depict Soviet life under Brezhnev and his immediate successors (Andropov and Chernenko) “as it really was”: Zavist’ bogov (Men’shov, 2000), the new year melodrama 32- ogo dekabria (Muratov, 2004), the biopic Brezhnev (Snethkin, 2005) and Gruz 200 (Balabanov, 2007). Despite their generic heterogeneity, these films betray a shared interest in turning the “spirit of the times” into a theme in its own right. My approach to these films is informed, first, by a simple observation made by various film historians and narratologists (for example, Seymour Chatman), namely that film is “overly specific” and requires the filling in of various details that literature can leave unspecified; and, second, by a paradox defined and analyzed by Alexei Yurchak in his recent book Everything Was Forever, Until it Was No More (2006) that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “…unimaginable before it began, [but] appeared unsurprising when it happened”. How do the aforementioned films resolve the tension between depicting a world that was perceived as “eternal” on one hand, and on the other hand, the “omniscience” of the post-Soviet viewer who knows that he is looking at the past? This is the central question underlying my presentation. 74 Ideology Without Plot? Adamovi Narratives of the Relief of Besieged Cities During WW II DE BRUYN , DIETER and DE DOBBELEER, MICHEL Ghent University (Belgium) E-Mails:

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Some of the most salient narratives of suffering in Slavic cultures were born out of the traumatic experiences of the Second World War. A particular ‘subgenre’ is made up by accounts of the relief of symbolic cities that were besieged or captured by the Nazis, such as the Leningrad Blockade, the Battle of Stalingrad or the Warsaw Uprising. What all these narratives seem to share, is that they have evolved – whether or not under specific Slavic and/or communist influence – to a dominant discourse of collective suffering. As a consequence, these ‘master narratives’ play an important role in the shaping of (national) ideological identities. By putting the heroic resistance, the enormous number of innocent casualties and other ‘proofs of the enemy’s badness’ into a story plot, the heroism of the Slavs on the one hand, and the wickedness of their Nazi opponents on the other, can be stressed rather easily. The propagandist material that such (master narrative) plot intervention produces, appears in almost every war context, irrespective of place or time. What gets lost in this process of plot intervention, then, is the expression of the actual feelings of loss and pain which have been experienced by every single victim. These concrete personal losses usually do not fit in easily with the existing master narratives, and ‘plotlessness’ seems to be a logical consequence of doing justice, giving voice to such de-ideologized, traumatic feelings. In the present paper, this issue will be addressed from a Bakhtinian point of view. More specifically, we will argue that these Slavic master narratives of symbolic city reliefs, originating in the strongly ideologized Second World War and displaying a so-called ‘mission plot’ (Bart Keunen’s term), find their counterparts in certain individual writers’ accounts of the same atrocities. Whereas the former are predominantly ‘monologic’ and characterized by an ‘epic’ plot, the latter clearly display features of ‘polyphony’ and plotlessness. In order to illustrate our hypothesis, we will introduce two particular examples of such polyphonic texts: A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising (1970) and The Blockade Book (1981) by Ales Adamovi of the complete destruction of the Polish capital, the narrator’s struggle with individual memory and the ineffability of suffering are given priority to the detriment of a real story plot. At the same heteroglossic reality, whereas the combatants and their ideologized world are merely represented as dehumanized objects (bullets, explosions, etc.). Adamovi & Granin, for their part, deconstruct the master narrative of the Leningrad Blockade into a patchwork of numerous individual testimonies. As will be demonstrated, though, a well-considered choice of and authorial comments on the represented ‘voices’ may still provide the individual accounts with overtones of ideology. 75 The “Rise of the Russian Novel” as an Alternative Model for Intellectuals on the Periphery: the Case of Brazil (1887–1924) GOMIDE, BRUNO University of São Paulo (Brazil) E-Mail:

The works of Dostoevskij and Tolstoj started to be discussed in Brazil at the end of the 1880s. This occurred during the wave of international diffusion unleashed by France, especially by the book manifesto le Roman Russe (1886) by catholic viscount Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, primus inter pares in placing the Russians on a different symbolic level. They were transformed together and posthumously (with the exception of Tolstoj in this last respect) into a compassionate and humanitarian alternative to the surgical coldness associated with the French naturalist novel. Given this bipolar argumentation, and helped by a favorable socio-political conjunction, the Russians entered in a decisive way into debates of fin-de-siècle esthetics and culture. My objective will be, initially in a brief manner, to present the features of this debate in Brazil and the elements that contributed to the international critical paradigm. To follow, the more substantial part of the paper will comment on the peculiarities present in the peripheral point of view of the Brazilian intellectuals. At first sight, texts such as “Dostoievski – naturalismo russo” (1888) by Clóvis Bevilacqua, the essays of José Carlos Júnior published between 1887 and 1888, and the texts by Vicente Licinio Cardoso on Dostoevsky (1924) are variants on the polarization between the “Russian” and “French” models; but a closer reading reveals that the Brazilian essayists frequently saw in the inception of the novel in Russia, and in the type of “alternative literary modernity” that it represented, a possible solution to the problem that had obsessed generations of Brazilian writers: the creation of a national literature that was desired to be inspired with authentic traits, possessed of a greater degree of freedom in the recreation of European genres and, at the same time, esthetically relevant. th The Russian novel was the first significant case in 19 -century European fiction of the appearance of a literature from a country until then considered by the public and critics outside of Russia to be “without literature”. While studies have already addressed the reception in countries such as France, England, Germany and the United States, there is still a void concerning peripheral scenarios and their specific cultural tensions. My hypothesis in this paper, which will be corroborated by Brazilian critical texts, is that the arrival of the Russian novel served as a powerful parameter (and source of enthusiasm) for many intellectuals and literary experts who at that time were investigating the existence or viability of their respective national literatures, and that the study of the Brazilian case would find parallels in other Latin-America countries and possibly in other contexts on the margins of the international literary system. 76 Dramatic Text Between Representation and Performance. Conceptualizations of ‚Drama’ and ‚Theatre 's “Realistic-Poetic Theatre” HARTMANN, BERNHARD University of Vienna (Austria) E-Mail:

field of drama as “realistic-poetic theatre” and refers to some of his plays as “written theatre”. The first edition of his complete dramatic works is entitled Teatr (2 vols., Kraków 1988), the second one Dramat not want to regard the quoted formulations as arbitrary or to understand ‘theatre’ simply as a synonym for ‘drama’, it seems necessary to define metapoetic reflection as well as their impact on the poetics of his drama. In its first part, the paper examines the use of the terms ‘drama’ and ‘theatre’ in and ork. To that end, the anti-theatrical conception of the artist as expressed among others in the essay ‘Teatralizacja’ poezji […] (The ‘Theatralization’ of Poetry, 1984) and the notion of ‘theatre’ as a place of confronts in talks and metatheatrical texts like Akt przerywany (The Interrupted Act, 1963) or Przyrost naturalny (Birth Rate, 1967) with the process of writing that demands the artist’s withdrawal from ‘life’ will be looked at. This will provide the ground for a closer description of the specifics of the above mentioned use of the terms ‘drama’ and ‘theatre’ and the concepts related to them. drama makes use of the performative dimension of theatre. In this part recent research on atre (Totzeva, Lehmann, Fischer-Lichte) will be taken into account. In an analysis of examples from notion of drama grounding on the idea of representation of meanings and attitudes and in which sense the emphasis on the theatrical dimension of the dramatic text together with the use of compositional techniques borrowed from his poetry has to be considered one of the fundamental constitutive ewicz’s plays. The paper’s main goal is to show that and how performative dimension that exceeds the “theatrical potential” (Totzeva) usually conceded to dramatic texts, because it is not restricted to a set of instructions for potential stage - poetic theatre” rather has to be read as a dramatic and thus literary practise that makes productive use of the concept of theatrical perfomance as a non-representative means of the constitution of sense. 77 Against Narrativity and Linearity: Landscapes of Postmodernism in the Theatre of Nekrosius and Vasiliev KRIJANSKAIA, DASHA Roosevelt Academy & Utrecht University (The Netherlands) E-Mail:

While a popular definiton of narrative states that “a narrative’ is a story or part of a story,” most literary scholars do not realize that the concept of narrative in drama goes all the way back to Aristotle. In Poetics, Aristotle endorsed cause-and-effect relation between the events as a fundamental aspect of the plot. Though Aristotle does not speak of narrative, Aristotelian plot is necessarily narrative and the storyline advances as a progression from past to future. Thus, causality presupposes that action entirely occurs in a linear time segment. With the advance of the postmodern era a conspicuous departure from the Aristotelian ideas on temporal linearity manifests itself in numerous stage pieces. Using the work of two prominent post-Soviet directors, Eimuntas Nekrosius and Anatoly Vasilyev, I will demonstrate how contemporary post-Soviet theatre uses a theatrical model based on the unity of time-space continuum rather than temporal development. To this end, I will employ the concept of theatrical landscape introduced by Elinor Fuchs as “dispersed fields of activity where many time periods may be represented simultaneously. There are, of course, human figures on these natural / conceptual landscapes, but the landscape itself is the central object of contemplation.”17 Following Fuchs' general ideas on time emptying itself into space and on multivalent spatial relationships prevalent in a contemporary stage piece, I will analyze particular staging methods the two directors use to suspend both plot and character development. The fact that both directors have received a rigorous training in Stanislavsky system at the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts makes their staging methods even more challenging. A Stanislavskian piece presupposes a psychological motivation of character's behavior, the primary role of character in the structure of the piece, causality on all structural levels and time linearity as a fundamental precondition. Breaking away from the magisterial tradition of the Russian theatre, both directors dispose of psychologism, causality and time linearity. Yet, to what extend a stage character as a major source of dramatic opposition is undermined in both Nekrosius and Vasilyev is a question left for future research. Nekrosius' stage works consist of scenes played as stage metaphors/images rather than the sequences of events to advance the plot. The transformations of images form what is referred to by the critics as by-plays – visually powerful scenes which retain only a suggestive connection to the original playtext. The text is usually truncated to free space for by-plays; and it is the by-plays that take up the task of forging an organic wholeness of Nekrosius' work. Vasilyev seeks to attain the immateriality of stage which is created and recreated at every single moment of the production. A self-styled Platonic, he finally discovered word as a non- material medium most suitable for attaining the ephemeral quality. He arrived at the idea of text devoid of its narrative function and of word purified of mundane meaning. The “beat of the attacking word” as Vasilyev describes it, becomes an audio sign which, combined with light and music scores, creates a domineering soundscape. Together with physical movement, this soundscape, in turn, accounts for Vasilyev's style as a mixture of stage game and religious ritual. My presentation will include video demonstrations of works by Nekrosius and Vasilyev. 17 Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1996: 12. 78 Nonsense And Trans-Sense In The Russian Xx-Century Avant-Garde: An Analysis Based On Karcevskij’s Theory Of Asymmetric Dualism DE OLIVEIRA , CASSIO Yale University (USA) E-Mail:

Sergej Karcevskij (1884-1955) is known in the history of twentieth-century linguistics as the man who introduced Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Générale to Russian academic circles upon his brief return to Russia after the October Revolution. However, Karcevskij inscribed his name among theorists of the relationship between literature and language in an essay that marked a break with standard Saussurean theory. In his great 1929 essay The Asymmetric Dualism of the Linguistic Sign18, he argued that parole exerts influence on langue as much as langue influences parole, i.e. the socially imposed value of language influences a priori any individual manifestation of the language. By creating this shift from Saussurean doctrine, Karcevskij revealed a new trend in linguistics, a trend that would pose a significant yet little studied influence on the ideas of later authors, both within and after the Prague Linguistic Circle. Karcevskij deals with the intrinsic ambiguity of the linguistic sign, as it oscillates between the poles of langue and parole, of the sign's socially-accepted value and its existence as part of an individual utterance. As the signifier and the signified (to use the Saussurean terminology) tend towards opposite poles, each sign is formed at the conjunction of two coordinates in relation to the two series of its components. In other words, given an axis of form (signifier) and an axis of meaning (signified), each sign can be said to be in a unique position in relation to these two axes: it is a unique combination of a determined signifier and signified. The oscillation of the linguistic sign between the two poles raises a number of important questions: what is the process by which an author ascribes meaning to signs that then are grasped by the reader? How much meaning can be imposed by an author on a linguistic sign without compromising its functionality as part of a socially-based form of communication? The fundamental issue is therefore, to what extent the “psychological,” subjective meaning of a word can be rendered in any text, and more particularly in a text in which context itself, that is the entire combination of signs, forms an a priori hermetic system incomprehensible to the reader? Examples of such texts are nonsense and trans-sense literature, which, by radically subverting conventions of what a work of literature should contain and express, put to test the theories used in literary interpretation. The aim of the present talk is to demonstrate that Karcevskij's theory, by creating a framework for a study of literary form and the creative process, provides substantial material for an analysis of nonsense and trans-sense texts. In this paper we will apply the theory of the asymmetric dualism to works by two of the most prominent authors in the Russian avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century: Daniil Charms (1905-1942) and Velimir Chlebnikov (1885-1922). 18 Karcevskij's article was originally published in: Karcevskij, Sergej. “Du dualisme asymétrique du signe linguistique.” Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague, I (1929): 88-92, and reprinted in Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure, 14 (1956): 18-24. 79 The Paphlagonian Enetoi / Veneti – The History of a Foundation Myth in Polish, Croatian, and Russian Historiography and Literature SCHULTE, JÖRG Warburg Institute, University of London (UK) E-Mail:

Classical Philology has shown, that the myth of the Paphlagonian people of the Henetoi – mentioned among others by Homer, Pseudo-Scymnos, Strabo and Livy – is the earliest known ethnogenetical myth which connects the origin of a European people to the history of the Trojan war. This myth, which might have inspired the Roman myth of the Trojan descent of Aeneas, has been rediscovered in the first half of the sixteenth century and since then played for more than three centuries a prominent role in Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern European historiography and literature. It was around 1538 in the Wittenberg circle of Philipp Melanchthon, Kaspar Peucer and Georg Sabinus, who were working on the edition of the Chronica Carionis, that for the first time a connection was made between the people of the Ouenedai, which according to Ptolemy’s Geography lived along the coast of the Baltic Sea, and the people of the Paphlagonian Enetoi/Veneti which had by then become a commonplace in the historiography of Padua and Venice. The myth became widely known through Melanchthon’s Epistola de origine gentis Henetae, Polonicae seu Sarmaticae which was printed together with Wenceslaus Grodecki’s Tabula Poloniae in 1558 and -Polish Dictionary of 1564. Since then it had left its trace in the great historiographical works of Polish humanists such as Marcin Kromer, The humanists’ fascination with the myth was due to the possibility to provide the national culture with a past which could compete with the Greek and Roman past and was not inferior to other European humanist cultures. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century the myth migrated into Czech and Croatian historiography and appears prominently in works like Mauro Orbino’s Il regno de gli slavi (1606), De Slowinis seu Sarmatis (1606), providing evidence for otherwise not documented humanist contacts in Easter Europe. The history of the Enetoi/Veneti further illustrates the reception of humanist historiography in Enlightenment Russia, e.g. by M. V. Lomonosov and N. M. Karamzin; it has further become a before the historical truth of the myth has been seriously questioned in the twentieth century. The myth has throughout the centuries remained an inspiration for Polish national poetry such as Jan Skorski’s Lechus, carmen heroicum Lechiada (1807), Juliusz Lilla Weneda (1840) and Antoni Lange’s Wenedzi (1909). The paper presents how the ethnogenetic myth of the Paphlagonian Enetoi/Veneti has reflected its original humanistic conception: It was first of all – in analogy to the Trojan origin in humanist French and English literature – a important argument for the development of a culture in the vernacular, providing at the same time the heroic motives necessary for national epic poetry. Though the paper will focus on the reconstruction of a humanist concept in Slavonic cultures, the tracing of the myth’s history will also reveal, how the myth has been – due rather to changing national concepts than to the historian’s vanity – “rediscovered” several times omitting the reference to its previous history. 80 Commemoration and Identity in Paris and Moscow – The Pushkin Celebrations of 1937 and the One-Day Gazette Pushkin STEWART, NEIL University of Bonn (Germany) E-Mail:

My suggested contribution will examine how the so-called “First Wave” of the Russian emigration sought to establish and protect its cultural identity against the cultural politics of the Bolshevik authorities back in Russia. More specifically, I will attempt to compare the rhetoric, rituals, and concepts of memory that were used on both sides on the occasion of the centenary of the death of Alexander Pushkin in 1937. Claiming the national poet – whose commanding position at the heart of the Russian literary canon may be without parallel in other national cultures – was a major issue for Russian intellectuals in- and outside the USSR. His memory served the respective sides to draw a line of demarcation against each other and at the same time to unify their own community. While Pushkin was pompously celebrated as a Russian proletarian hero in Moscow and Leningrad, the elite of the émigré community in Paris (I. Bunin, A. Remizov, N. Berberova, K. Bal’mont, I. Shmelev and others) interpreted him in a collection of essays – The One-Day Gazette Pushkin – as “a symbol and product of the Russian Empire”. Arguably more interesting than the obvious ideological differences is a similar tendency on both sides, namely the ‘classicist turn’ away from the more experimental and avant-garde Pushkin criticism of the preceding decades. Analysing problems of canon and cultural identity amounts to analysing problems of collective memory. The cultural or collective memory of a community is not of course about reconstructing the past as such. Rather, it is carefully constructed according to the needs of that community’s present. Some things are remembered while others are left out, and this is a thoroughly deliberate and ideologically motivated process. My presentation will demonstrate by means of a comparison of the Paris Gazette Pushkin and a corresponding issue of the Soviet journal Novyi mir (nr. 1, 1937) how making someone a classic is necessarily a process of de-contextualisation, exclusion and closure. From there I go on to suggest that Russian émigré and Soviet culture be contrasted in terms of memory structures, setting off the exiles’ reliance on (“prosaic”) narrative discourse against Soviet (“lyrical”) evocations of magical presence. 81 The Literary Canon as a Means of Constructing Collective Memory – The Canonisation of the Bosnian Literature of the Austro-Hungarian Epoch (1878-1918) VERVAET, STIJN Ghent University (Belgium) E-Mail:

In this paper I will analyse how the Bosnian literary canon of the Austro-Hungarian epoch (1878- 1918) evolved after the downfall of the empire. I will argue that the evolution of the Bosnian literary canon is a part of a broader cultural process, which consists in the construction of collective cultural memory about the Habsburg legacy in Bosnia and in the transformation of the cultural/national identity of the country and its peoples. The Bosnian literature of the Austro- Hungarian period provides us with a particularly interesting case of literature becoming a cultural Leitmedium that plays the key role in the construction of national identities. Namely, the intensive promotion of ‘national consciousness’ and defence of ‘the own national identity’ gave the Bosnian literature of that period a strongly didactic character and resulted in an intense discursive production of nationalist myths, collective autostereotypes and heterostereotypes about the other ethnic groups as well as about the Austrian occupier. My analysis of the post-Habsburg canonisation processes within Bosnian literature will focus on the following questions: a) Which are the aesthetical and ideological qualities that according to Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian literary historians assured a literary work of the Habsburg period a place in the Bosnian literary canon? b) How did these aesthetical and ideological criteria evolve in the interwar period (1918- 1941), in the Socialist Yugoslavia (1945-1990) and in the 1990’s respectively? c) To which extent did these criteria differ from the dominant ideological discourse of these periods, and from the ideological discourse of the literary works concerned? My investigation shows that the changing reception of the Bosnian literature of the Austro-Hungarian era and the dynamics of its canonisation were seldom determined by the rise of new literary techniques and schools and by the changing literary taste of the reader. To a much greater extent they were determined by a sustained ideological effort of literary historians and critics to construct a specific cultural memory (about the Austro-Hungarian legacy in Bosnia) which would suit the rising national narrative. This resulted in an uncritical reproduction of the nationalist narratives and stereotypes of the literary works of the Austro-Hungarian epoch without proper historical contextualization. The Appeal of Hybridity: Russian Translingual Writers in the 21st Century WANNER, ADRIAN Pennsylvania State University (USA) E-Mail:

Authors writing in a language other than their native tongue have become a common phenomenon in a period of porous borders and increased international mobility. The most prominent bilingual Russian writer of the past century has been Vladimir Nabokov, but he is 82 certainly not the only one. Over the past decade several younger writers of Russian origin have achieved literary stardom with books written in French, German, and English. Unlike Nabokov, who began his career as a Russian writer before switching to English in mid-life, these authors never published anything in their native idiom. Given that they are using the language of their adopted home countries exclusively, they need to be classified as translingual rather than bilingual writers. At the same time Russia remains a prominent topic in their writings. This raises some intriguing questions about their national identity. Should they be considered “Russian writers,” even though they do not write in Russian? To be sure, no unequivocal answer can be given to this question. Rather than as a fixed essence, the national identity of the translingual writer is best seen as a conscious and ongoing positioning involving both the authors and interpretive communities in their former and current countries of residence. This paper will focus on three Russian-born émigré writers – Andreï Makine (b. 1957, residing in France), Wladimir Kaminer (b. 1967, residing in Germany), and Gary Shteyngart (b. 1972, residing in the US). All three of them achieved instant fame with a book written in the language of their country of residence – Le testament français (1995), Russendisko (2000), and the Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002). Since then they all have embarked on successful international careers as bestselling writers. Makine has published ten novels to date, Kaminer is the author of eleven books, and Shteyngart’s second novel, Absurdistan, was nominated by the New York Times as one of the best ten books published in 2006. Among the questions I will address in my paper are the following: How do these authors construct a bifurcated hybrid persona that negotiates between their Russian and their non-Russian identities? What role, or “niche,” are they occupying in the national contexts of German, French, and American literature? How are their works received both in their current countries of residence and in their former homeland? And, given that two of these authors are Jewish, what role does their Jewish background play in their mix of identities? While there are significant stylistic and ideological differences between the three authors, my thesis is that each of them in his own way projects a “Russian” persona to the Western public. Using the notion of cultural hybridity, the paper explores the various strategies these authors have adopted in fashioning an identity for themselves that is tailored to meet the demands of the reading public in their respective host nations while exploiting the cachet of the Russian “brand name” in today’s global literary economy. 83