Annual Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics. The Seattle Meeting 1998 (review)

These papers, presented at the Seventh FASL Workshop at the University of Washington in Seattle, 8–10 May 1998, cover East, West, and South Slavic languages and address issues in phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse. This volume will be of interest both for Slavic scholars and generative linguists that study other languages.

Of the 21 papers in this volume, about half focus on topics in syntax. Different frameworks are represented in those syntactic papers. For example, the papers by Sue Brown (‘Negated yes/no questions in Russian and Serbian/Croatian’) and Edit Jakab (‘A minimalist approach to infinitival and subjunctive(- like) constructions in Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian’) are couched in the minimalist framework. Steven Franks (‘Optimality theory and clitics at PF’) proposes an analysis that combines minimalism with optimality theory. Anna Kupść (‘Negative concord and wh-extraction in Polish’) takes a lexical HPSG approach. Michael B. Smith (‘Motivating some grammaticalized senses of Russian instrumental’) proposes an analysis within cognitive grammar, and Mirjam Fried (‘The “free” datives in Czech as a linking problem’) uses the tools of construction grammar.

The range of topics addressed is also very wide. Some papers address long-standing issues in Slavic syntax while others present new facts and analyses. For instance, both Leonard H. Babby (‘Adjectives in Russian: Primary vs. secondary predication’) and John Bailyn and Barbara Citko (‘Case and agreement in Slavic predicates’) address the issue of adjectival predication in Russian and Polish. This theme is echoed in the semantic paper by Barbara Partee: ‘Copula inversion puzzles in English and Russian’. Another well-known issue is revisited by Eric S. Komar, ‘Dative subjects in Russian revisited: Are all datives created equal?’. In contrast, the papers by Steven Franks and Piotr Bański (‘Approaches to “schizophrenic” Polish person agreement’) and James Lavine (‘Subject properties and ergativity in North Russian and Lithuanian’) explore less investigated topics.

Other syntactic papers include: ‘Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian clitics at the lexical interface’ by Andrew Caink, ‘Subjunctive complements, null subjects and case checking in Bulgarian’ by Iliyana Krapova and Vassil Petkov, and ‘Predictive rules of direct object ellipsis in Russian’ by Marjorie McShane.

Semantics is represented by papers by Vladimir Borschev and Barbara Partee in ‘Semantic types and the Russian genitive modifier construction’, and Partee’s ‘Copula inversion puzzles in English and Russian’. The issues of language processing are addressed by Irina A. Sekerina in ‘On-line processing of Russian scrambling constructions: Evidence from eye movement during listening’.

Four papers in the volume are dedicated to phonological issues. Ben Hermans’s paper ‘Opaque insertion sites in Bulgarian’ discusses the distribution of epenthetic schwa in Bulgarian and proposes an analysis couched in optimality theory. Brett Hyde (‘Overlapping feet in Polish’) investigates syllabic structures and stress patterns in Polish; his analysis is likewise cast in optimality framework. Both Darya Kavitskaya (‘Voicing assimilation and the schizophrenic behavior of /v/ in Russian’) and Rami Nair (‘Polish voicing assimilation and final devoicing: A new analysis’) investigate voicing assimilation processes. While the former paper adopts optimality theory, the latter shows that this framework is inadequate to describe the facts it investigates.