Slavic Languages and Literatures

This paper investigates the inflectional and derivational processes typical for the language used in the Russian social network “Vkontakte.” The paper provides qualitative analysis of the collected data from the above-mentioned web-site within the lexeme-based approach to morphology. The research was aimed to find the morphological processes, popular among “Vkontakte” users and to see if there are any new derivational processes, not typical for Russian. In the collected data, I single out onomatopoeia, borrowing and borrowed acronyms, semantic change, and morphological derivation that includes affixation, de-affixation, truncation, compounding, and clipped-compounding. These processes are typical for the Russian language in general and were previously described by Lopatin (1973), Cubberley (2002), Ryazanova-Clarke and Wade (1999), and Zemskaia (1992). The data include examples of non-typical for Russian derivation processes, like reduplication, blending, and metathesis. The inflecti...

This talk will examine the application of the Movement Theory of Control (Hornstein 2001, inter alia) to Russian, Polish, and Bulgarian reflexive data and consider where it can handle the data and where it cannot. Difficult issues within Slavic include long-distance antecedents, homonyms with either reflexive or reciprocal interpretation (i.e., Polish siebie), and the (non-standard) Bulgarian nego si, which seems to behave both as a reflexive and as a pronoun. This theory has difficulties in accounting for the full range of Slavic data. For example, the MTC states that the reflexive is a lower copy of the antecedent, which is changed into a reflexive to save the derivation at Spell-Out. This can easily account for the binding interpretation between a reflexive and a local antecedent, but greater distances of hypothetical movement become difficult with respect to the principles of shortest move and move-over-merge, especially given the optionality of coreference. Some work has been done on reflexives using the MTC (Boeckx, Hornstein, and Nunes 2008, Drummond 2011, among others), but little or none within Slavic.

While traditional Russian grammars (e.g., Wade 2000: 142–44) and textbooks (e.g., Ervin et al. 2002: 55–56) point out that optionality exists in the choice between pronominal and reflexive possessives in first- and second-person but not third-person contexts, various linguists (e.g., Yokoyama 1975; Yokoyama and Klenin 1976; Timberlake 1980) attempt to identify the semantic differences in these choices. According to Yokoyama (1975) and Yokoyama and Klenin (1976), these differences can correlate to a variation in closeness, be it temporal closeness or emotional closeness. Such differences are also related to what Timberlake (1980) suggests are categorized under the meta-principle of “uniqueness”: the less the antecedent is individually referential (a hypothetical versus a distinct individual; a member of a collective versus a discrete individual), the less likely the anaphor is to appear as a reflexive. Since these treatments of several decades ago, little research has been done on this topic (although Timberlake 2004 does revisit the subject). In this presentation, I will revisit the factors at work in selecting the most appropriate form, using an Optimality Theoretic approach. This framework is ideal for handling the apparent “optionality” between pronouns and reflexives. In my analysis, a ranked hierarchy of constraints will be proposed to account for the different options, and it will be shown that the optimal choices are in fact not optional at all.