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Исследования по теории грамматики. (Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. Труды Института лингвистических исследований РАН. Т. XII. Ч. 2.)
The paper focuses on the two most important perfective forms expressing past time reference in the Nizh dialect of Udi, a language of the Lezgic group of East Caucasian family. The form with the suffix -i is the most frequent in narrative texts, and can be properly characterized as the Aorist (perfective past). The form with the suffix -e is less frequent, but has a wide range of uses, including the expression of current relevance of past situations and the experiential meaning, as well as the resultative meaning (present state); on the whole, this form fits the crosslinguistic category of the perfect. There is also the Pluperfect, which is derived from the Perfect by means of the “retrospective switch” enclitic, and is semantically a “perfect in the past”. Apart from the functional differences between the Aorist and the Perfect, there is a number of morphosyntactic ones. In particular, the default position of person markers on the verb is enclitic in case of the Perfect, but endoclitic (intraclitic) in case of the Aorist. Also, there is a special negation strategy available only for the Perfect, which includes the perfective participle and the postpositional negative complex. According to the hypothesis put forward in the paper, this negation structure may at least partly disclose the origin of the Perfect form, which seems to be based on the participle. The diachronic scenarios of the Aorist and the Perfect origin and evolution are discussed in the paper, as well as the perspectives for future research of the system of past tenses in Udi.
The paper describes the group of perfective past tenses in Aghul (Lezgic, East Caucasian), focusing on the expression of the perfect meaning. There are four verbal forms which can express the meaning of the perfect ‘family’; at the same time, it is not obvious whether Aghul can be qualified as a language with a dedicated perfect form. All the four forms in question are periphrastic in origin, with the perfective converb or participle of the main verb and the postpositional auxiliary in the present tense. The Aorist is a typical perfective past used in narratives, although it is employed in the immediate (‘hot news’) contexts as well. The “participial” Aorist has an experiential or existential meaning, which is commonly associated with perfects. The Resultative is a polyfunctional form which expresses both perfect and resultative meanings, as well as indirect evidentiality in the past (in the latter function, it is a frequent tense used in ‘second-hand’ narratives). Finally, the “participial” Resultative has a narrower perfect meaning and introduces a currently relevant situation as already “known”, the function of the corresponding clause being explanatory or confirmatory. Thus, Aghul can be said to possess two perfect-like forms, one with a wide distribution, and another with a more narrow distribution than expected of a ‘classical’ current-relevance perfect.
Each of the four forms has a counterpart with the ‘pluperfect’ structure, including the perfective converb or participle and the auxiliary in the past. These forms express the meanings that are typical of pluperfects cross-linguistically, including the resultant state in the past, the anteriority in the past, ‘discontinuous’ past etc.
Purpose: This study investigated how listeners’ native language affects their weighting of acoustic cues (such as vowel quality, pitch, duration, and intensity) in the perception of contrastive word stress. Method: Native speakers (N = 45) of typologically diverse languages (English, Russian, and Mandarin) performed a stress identification task on nonce disyllabic words with fully crossed combinations of each of the 4 cues in both syllables. Results: The results revealed that although the vowel quality cue was the strongest cue for all groups of listeners, pitch was the second strongest cue for the English and the Mandarin listeners but was virtually disregarded by the Russian listeners. Duration and intensity cues were used by the Russian listeners to a significantly greater extent compared with the English and Mandarin participants. Compared with when cues were noncontrastive across syllables, cues were stronger when they were in the iambic contour than when they were in the trochaic contour. Conclusions: Although both English and Russian are stress languages and Mandarin is a tonal language, stress perception performance of the Mandarin listeners but not of the Russian listeners is more similar to that of the native English listeners, both in terms of weighting of the acoustic cues and the cues’ relative strength in different word positions. The findings suggest that tuning of second-language prosodic perceptions is not entirely predictable by prosodic similarities across languages.
This book is a collection of articles dealing with various aspects of grammatical relations and argument structure in the languages of Europe and North and Central Asia (LENCA). Topics covered with respect to individual languages are: split-intransitivity (Basque), causativization (Agul), transitives and causatives (Korean and Japanese), aspectual domain and quantification (Finnish and Udmurt), head-marking principles (Athabaskan languages), and pragmatics (Eastern Khanty and Xibe). Typology of argument-structure properties of ‘give’ (LENCA), typology of agreement systems, asymmetry in argument structure, typology of the Amdo Sprachbund, spatial realtors (Northeastern Turkic), core argument patterns (languages of Northern California), and typology of grammatical relations (LENCA) are the topics of articles based on cross-linguistic data. The broad empirical sweep and the fine-tuned theoretical analysis highlight the central role of argument structure and grammatical relations with respect to a plethora of linguistic phenomena.
The volume includes proceedings of the 23th Scandianvian Conference of Linguistics (SCL 23) that was held at Uppsala University 1–3 October 2008. It includes studies covering a wide spectrum of approaches to linguistics, for example, cross-linguistic typological studies, linguistic variation and language change in contact situations as well as studies relating to bilingualism and to second and foreign language learning.
In the paper, the classes of labile verbs (verbs which can be transitive or intransitive without any formal changes) are analyzed on the data of European and North Caucasian languages. The main conclusion is that there is a semantic difference between classes of labile verbs in the two language groups under analysis. In European languages, predicates with low semantic transitivity are labile (for instance, motion verbs and phasal verbs), while in Caucasian languages, lability is more characteristic of verbs with high semantic transitivity (verbs of destruction and similar verb classes).
In my paper, two approaches to verb classification in Adyghe, a language of the West Caucasian family, are discussed. The first approach is a purely morphological classification based on the choice of person cross-referencing prefixes. The second one is a derivational classification which builds on the morphological mechanisms of reciprocalization and reflexivization. The main research question which lies behind the classification study is whether verbs derived by means of the reciprocal or reflexive marker behave in the course of further valency-changing operations differently from nonderived verbs.
I show that verb classification in Adyghe has some typologically peculiar properties, the main one being that the derivational classification distinguishes more specific classes than the purely morphological one. In other words, the fact that a verb is derived is crucial for its behavior. The language-specific properties of Adyghe are also typologically relevant. They show that derived verbs and derivational mechanisms are of particular relevance in verb classification and should be given more attention in linguistic work on verb classification than is currently done.
If anything, Europe’s linguistically most exotic area is the Caucasus. In terms of linguistic density it is the subcontinent’s New Guinea. Languages of Western, Central and Eastern Europe are less typologically diverse – and not much more numerous – than the languages spoken in its southeastern corner. Three “endemic” language families are spoken here, South Caucasian (Kartvelian), Northeast or simply East Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestanian) and Northwest or simply West Caucasian (Abkhaz-Adyghe). The latter two are sometimes considered to form a deep-level North Caucasian family (see Nikolaev and Starostin 1994), but this entity is disputed. An earlier hypothesis of genealogical relations between all endemic families (the assumed Ibero-Caucasian family) has now been largely abandoned (cf. Tuite 2008). The linguistic diversity of the area is further extended by the presence of Turkic and Indo-European languages. We will primarily deal with endemic families, sometimes also with Armenian (for the purposes of this survey, the difference between Eastern and Western Armenian may be neglected), to a lesser extent with Iranian languages which are also spoken outside the Caucasus and minimally with the Turkic languages, as Turkic is dealt with in a separate chapter of the present volume.
The paper is focused on the study of reaction of italian literature critics on the publication of the Boris Pasternak's novel "Doctor Jivago". The analysys of the book ""Doctor Jivago", Pasternak, 1958, Italy" (published in Russian language in "Reka vremen", 2012, in Moscow) is given. The papers of italian writers, critics and historians of literature, who reacted immediately upon the publication of the novel (A. Moravia, I. Calvino, F.Fortini, C. Cassola, C. Salinari ecc.) are studied and analised.
In the article the patterns of the realization of emotional utterances in dialogic and monologic speech are described. The author pays special attention to the characteristic features of the speech of a speaker feeling psychic tension and to the compositional-pragmatic peculiarities of dialogic and monologic text.