Stress, gender, and declension class in Belarusian

Ongoing innovations in Standard Belarusian nominal declension indicate that speakers are aware of and actively using paradigmatic stress patterns for grammatical purposes. The adoption of new mobile stress patterns in paradigms which originally had fixed stress is now complementary in Declension Ia masculine nouns and in Declension II feminine nouns; most neuter nouns simply default to fixed stem stress. The highlighting of grammatical gender distinctions via changes in paradigmatic stress patterns has led to a reanalysis of stress, gender, and declension class in common gender and a-stem masculine nouns and their case exponents have now become stress-dependent, a situation markedly distinct from that found in the other closely related East Slavic languages, Russian, and Ukrainian. These developments pose a challenge for several theories of morphology, either because the theory takes paradigmatic stress to be dependent on declension class or because the theory does not have a provision for paradigmatic stress to determine inflectional exponents.

Обзор альтернативных типологий славянских языков

Тематика типологии славянских языков была многократно затронута в разнообразных исследованиях, начиная, по-видимому, со второй половины XIX века. Первой значительной попыткой можно считать негенетическую классификацию славянских языков, сделанную Иваном Александровичем Бодуэном де Куртенэ.1С тех пор, естественно, появились более новые работы, но нельзя ска- зать, что их было очень много. Поэтому цель настоящего краткого обзора – обратить внимание не столько на богатство теорий, а скорее на своеобраз- ность подходов к данной проблематике на разных уровнях изучения языка. Таким образом, целесообразно рассмотреть попытки фонологической, мор- фологической и синтаксической типологии славянских языков отдельно. Та- кое решение подтверждается и тем, что общей типологии, соблюдающей все названные уровни вместе, пока не существует.The typology of Slavic languages has been frequently dealt with in different publications since the late 19th century. In this paper, the author reviews some of the most significant attempts aimed at the phonological, morphological, and syntactic levels of this typological research. It appears that the phonological classification first elaborated by Baudouin de Courtenay has remained reliable to this day. In morphology, however, the only method for categorization seems to be the identification of certain grammatical markers. Syntactic ty- pology is still a young field of linguistics; nevertheless, there exist promising ventures in it, too. It is remarkable that the typological findings for the modern Slavic languages to a large extent coincide with the results of areal studies.Based on the information presented in the paper, the following implications can be made with reference to the typology of the specific linguistic levels in the Slavic languages. The most uniform level is that of phonological typology because in all the models presented here, a key role is played by two prosodic features: the opposition of long and short vowels, on the one hand, and the character of word stress, on the other. Thus, the pho- nological typology first elaborated by Baudouin de Courtenay has proved to be reliable up to the present. At least no competing theories in this field can be seen for the time being.As to morphological typology, it is not possible to identify features or criteria similar to the phonological models which could be applied for the differentiation of whatever mor- phological types. The Slavic languages, even Bulgarian and Macedonian, which have no nominal declension, have remained fusional (inflectional) languages, within which it is not easy to delineate further subtypes. So far, the only way of morphological categorization seems to be the identification and comparison of individual grammatical features of the different Slavic languages, as it is illustrated tentatively in Section 2.The syntactic typology of the Slavic languages is still a very young field of typologi- cal research. Therefore, it is impossible to arrive at any general conclusions on this matter (besides the ones mentioned in Section 3). The model offered by Haspelmath for the Euro- pean languages looks quite promising but it is necessary to work out further details and spe- cific methods so that it could be successfully applied specifically for the Slavic languages.One cannot fail to notice that the typological regularities specified by way of the mor- phological and syntactic observations in Sections 2 and 3, to a marked extent coincide with the facts of the areal (geographical) classification of the Slavic languages, as it was sharply noticed by Bogoroditsky, Janda, Tommola, and other researchers.

Old French nominal declension – reality or illusion?

The article examines the Old French nominal declension theory, which, despite criticism and convincing against arguments, remains a postulate of the French language history. This study aims to verify the theory based on comparison and critical analysis of arguments and facts obtained from the history of French during 200 years of empirical research. The analysis showed that the opinion about the declension reality is based on variable graphic forms with -s / without -s present in the 9–15th c. French manuscripts unreasonably identified as grammatical and treated as case forms. All deviations from the formulated by Fr. Raynouard's «s rules» are considered «errors» resulting from the progressive destruction of declension in French dialects during the 11–15th c. The illusory nature of the declension, first mentioned by Fr. Guessard and Fr. Génin, was confirmed by empirical studies of the 20–21th c. The article presents the following evidence of the absence of the Old French declension as a valid grammatical system: zero functional significance of case forms and declension in general, the absence of grammatical forms of the direct case regularly expressing the grammatical meaning of the direct case and opposed to the corresponding forms of the indirect case in language and speech, limitation and lacunarity of declension, covering a small part of nouns, adjectives, articles, etc., the absence of regular types and paradigms of declension, no clear boundaries between «declinable» and «non-declinable» names, up to 100% of «errors in declension». The variability of graphic forms with -s / without -s observed in French manuscripts is a purely graphic phenomenon associated with different scriptural standards (analogical or etymological type of graphic design of the name). The presence of manuscripts made in the same dialect zone, but differing in the type of graphic design disproves the dialect theory of declension.

√ov Is in the Air

In this paper we consider several instances of the Slovenian affix ov, which surfaces in many, apparently unrelated contexts. Here we focus on (i) ov in verbs, where it can act as an imperfectivizer or a verbalizer, (ii) ov found in possessive adjectives and kind adjectives derived from nouns, (iii) ov which precedes the adjectiviser (e)n in denominal adjectives, and (iv) ov in nominal declension (acting as a genitive case ending in dual and plural or as a dual/plural augment). Building on the observation that certain affixes function either as inflectional or as derivational (see Simonović and Arsenijević 2020), and working within a Distributed Morphology approach which postulates that derivational affixes should be analyzed as roots (e.g. Lowenstamm 2014), we argue for a single multifunctional ov. This ov is a potentially meaningless root that can take as a complement other roots (thus forming a “radical core”) or phrases, resulting in different structures and consequently different stress patterns and meanings, but can also act as an Elsewhere allomorph, whose insertion is guided by an interplay of phonological and morphological constraints.

Episodic versus generic eventualities and nominals

This paper proposes an analysis of the DP structure of Chinese in comparison with German and other West Germanic languages, particularly English. The analysis is linked to sentence structure, particularly event structure of the respective languages and the relation between nominal classifiers and sentential tense. Chinese is a language without nominal declension; German is not as other Indo-European languages. Among the inflectional paradigms, German has retained from earlier periods, and developed further, the coding of topicality in terms of familiarity and anaphoricity. While Chinese shares with German clause syntactic topicality, it does so purely in terms of clause-early and clause-late word order. German, by contrast, involves specific positions in the serial middle field to code referential familiarity, anaphoricity, and, above all, weak versus strong referential weight to distinguish, among other functions, specific versus unspecific reference. The categories involved in coding such properties in German are determiners and the declensional morphology of attributes (‘strong’ versus ‘weak’ inflection providing specific reference). This paper investigates the regularities of weak and strong reference in Chinese. The discussion yields insight into the structural coding that Chinese provides instead of what is encoded in German in morphological terms on adjectival attributes and in terms determiners ((in)definite articles and bare nouns). In the course, the discussion around mass versus count nouns and the role of classifiers is brought up and newly evaluated on the basis of the new referential distinctions.

Праславянская “грушавая” лексіка ў беларускай і польскай мовах

This article is devoted to the evolution of the “pear” nominations common to the Belarusian and Polish languages in the structural and semantic aspects, star¬ting from the Proto-Slavic period, as well as the image of the pear in the languages and folk cultures of both peoples. Firstly, the problem of the relative chronology of the Proto-Slavic names of the pear is revealed. Disclosure is reached on the basis of comparing lexemes with different anlauts and types of nominal declension. Secondly, a comparative analysis of changes in the semantics of the continuums of the Proto-Slavic “pear” vocabulary, which is included in the Belarusian and Polish lexical fund, is carried out. Thirdly, through the identification of similar and differ-rent motives in the lexical and phraseological material of the Belarusian and Polish languages, the problem of updating the linguistic image of the pear in the ethnocultural consciousness of Belarusians and Poles is revealed.

Indo-European nominal o-stems and question of their origin

Václav Blažek. Indo-European nominal o-stems and question of their origin. The Poznań Society for the Advancement of Arts and Sciences, PL ISSN 0079-4740, pp. 7-16 In the article the most productive formation of the Indo-European nominal declension, the o-stems, are described and analyzed. Two competing interpretations are discussed. One of them is finally preferred with respect to external typological parallels.

Lacking integrity: HPSG as a morphosyntactic theory

Standard accounts of HPSG assume a distinction between morphology and syntax. However, despite decades of research, no cross-linguistically valid definition of 'word' has emerged (Haspelmath, 2010), suggesting that no sharp distinction is justified. Under such a view, the basic units are morphemes, rather than words, but it has been argued this raises problems when analysing phenomena such as zero inflection, syncretism, stem alternations, and extended exponence. We argue that with existing HPSG machinery, a morpheme-based approach can in fact deal with such issues. To illustrate this, we consider Slovene nominal declension and Georgian verb agreement, which have both been used to argue against constructive morpheme-based approaches. We overcome these concerns through use of a type hierarchy, and give a morpheme-based analysis which is simpler than the alternatives. Furthermore, we can recast notions from Word-and-Paradigm morphology, such as 'rule of referral' and 'stem space', in our framework. We conclude that using HPSG as a unified morphosyntactic theory is not only feasible, but also yields fruitful insights.

Variable morphotactics in Information-based Morphology

We address variable morphotactics, the phenomenon of order variability of morphs, in the context of inflectional morphology. Based on an extended discussion of cross-linguistic variation, including conjugation in Nepali, Fula, Swahili, Chintang and Italian, and nominal declension in Ostyak and Mari, we propose a canonical typology that identifies different deviations from strict ordering. Following a discussion of previous approaches to the problem, we propose Information-based Morphology, an inferential-realisational and model-theoretic approach to morphology couched in a logic of typed feature structures. Within this formal theory, we develop detailed analyses of the core cases in the typology and show how different types and degrees of deviation from the canon can be pin-pointed in the relative complexity of the rule type hierarchies that model the data. Furthermore, we show that complex deviations, as attested in Mari, can be understood as combinations of more basic deviations.