Working paper
General converbs in Mehweb
The paper considers morphology, morphosyntax and semantics of causative formation in Agul, a Lezgic language of Southern Daghestan (Russia). In Agul, the two most frequent causative patterns, periphrastic and compound causatives, apparently share one source of grammaticalization. The former are combinations of ‘do’ with the infinitive of the lexical verb, while the latter put them together as two bound stems. However, semantically 'do'-compounds belong with non-productive causatives (labile verbs and lexical causatives) and are opposed to fully productive periphrastic causatives. All non-productive causatives – only available for intransitive verbs – have parallel periphrastic ‘do’-causatives, the distinction between the parallel forms conveys the semantic contrast of direct vs. indirect causation. The paper makes an attempt at decomposing these typological categories into simpler components (intentionality, physical interaction, event structure), and provides a detailed semantic analysis of labile verbs and semantically irregular causatives. Periphrastic causatives are peculiar in their own way: they may introduce locative or ergative Causee, the choice depending on the degree of the Causee's control over the caused situation. Basing on this morphosyntactic variability, we argue that periphrastic causatives are intermediate between bi- and monoclausal constructions.
This is an interdisciplinary volume that focuses on the central topic of the representation of events, namely cross-cultural differences in representing time and space, as well as various aspects of the conceptualisation of space and time. It brings together research on space and time from a variety of angles, both theoretical and methodological. Crossing boundaries between and among disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, philosophy, or anthropology forms a creative platform in a bold attempt to reveal the complex interaction of language, culture, and cognition in the context of human communication and interaction.
The authors address the nature of spatial and temporal constructs from a number of perspectives, such as cultural specificity in determining time intervals in an Amazonian culture, distinct temporalities in a specific Mongolian hunter community, Russian-specific conceptualisation of temporal relations, Seri and Yucatec frames of spatial reference, memory of events in space and time, and metaphorical meaning stemming from perception and spatial artefacts, to name but a few themes.
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 article aims to test the syntactic status of sentential arguments in constructions with predicatives in Russian, such as "Mne interesno, kak on eto sdelal" 'I wonder (it is interesting to me) how he did this'. The conclusion is that, though there are few tests which unequivocally show the subject status of all sentential arguments of predicatives, a subclass of predicatives, such as "interesno" 'interesting' prove to have a sentential argument with subject properties
The volume presents several papers on Mehweb, a one-village language spoken in the central part of Daghestan, a republic of the Russian Federation.
The paper is an analysis of the concessive domain in Agul (Lezgic, East Caucasian). The main means to express concession in Aghul is a dedicated concessive converb. Also described are constructions with the optative and the temporal converb and conditional concessive constructions.
In the article, the relevance of Bybee's opposition of product-based generalizations vs. source-based generalizations for syntax is argued. Corpus data of Russian are used.
This study deals with the locative systems of seventeen northern dialects of the Dargwa language (the Dargwa group of the Northeast Caucasian language family). In the first part of the paper I discuss the relations between spatial and non-spatial uses of the localization morphemes. Here I prove that locatives are not equal in their ability to be used in non-spatial contexts and most of such uses concentrate around two morphemes: *cːi INTER and *ki SUPER, while other morphemes either develop a very limited set of non-locative uses or do not develop them at all. The second point of this part is that the semantic source of the non- spatial uses of the locatives is their spatial meaning at the moment of their grammaticalization and not their synchronic spatial meaning. In the second part of the paper I apply statistical methods to the distribution of the non- locative contexts among the morphemes of localization and orientation. Here I show that even though the non-spatial semantics of inter and super are not always connected to their locative semantics, the choice between the two localization is not random and the contexts form two clear clusters. In this section, I also analyze the non-locative uses of orientations and show that the vagueness of the difference between lative and essive that exists in spatial contexts is reflected in non-spatial contexts as well.
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.