JSL Volume 6.2
Summer-Fall 1998

From the Editor (159-160)

Reflections

Charles E. Townsend. Slavic Linguistics: From Jers to Dostoevsky to Jers and Theta-Roles. (161-170)

Articles
George Cummins. Indefiniteness in Czech (171-204)
Maaike Schoorlemmer. Complex Event Nominals in Russian: Properties and Readings (205-254).
Ludmila Veselovska. Possessive Movement in the Czech Nominal Phrase (255-300)
Reviews
[Sue Brown and Catherine Chvany]: A.A. Kibrik, I.M. Kobozeva, I.A. Sekerina. Fundamental'ny napravlenija sovremennoj amerikanskoj lingvistiki. Sbornik obzorov. [Basic trends in contemporary American linguistics: A collection of essays] (301-323)

-------------------------------------------------------


Indefiniteness in Czech

George Cummins

In Czech there are no articles; determination (definiteness and indefiniteness), a linguistic universal, is known to be submerged in the wider domains of discourse context, sentence intonation, word order, and lexical quantification. The following study examines the interaction of these domains in the expression of indefiniteness, with spe cial attention to word order, speaker-knowledge entailments, and the four quantifiers nejaky, jakysi, jeden, and jakykoliv. It is shown that in some environments nejaky 'a; some' approaches the status of an indefinite article. In certain word-order contexts this quantifier is obligatory with animate subjects.


-------------------------------------------------------


Complex Event Nominals in Russian: Properties and Readings

Maaike Schoorlemmer

Derived nominals in Russian and many other languages come in types with different interpretations, different relations to the underlying verb and different argument realizations. This paper argues for an approach to these distinctions along the following lines:

The context determination of the available reading extends to al possible noun phrases in a particular context. It turns out that in any context (i.e. reading) a CEN may occur in any argument realization.


-------------------------------------------------------


Possessive Movement in the Czech Nominal Phrase

Ludmila Veselovska

In this paper I demonstrate the semantic, morphological, and syntactic restrictions on possessive formation in Czech. Referring to the distinctions between possessive (poss) and genitive (gen) I argue that poss are nps while gens are dps in Czech and their complementary distribution is evidence for a syntactic movement which I call Possessive Movement. I propose that the potential of n to take an argument is encoded as a weak subcategorization feature +a of n. Referring to the Unlike Feature Condition I propose that if a cannot be satisfied at LF within the smallest np domain, it is transferred as strong to the N's functional projection d. The checking of the feature a of n takes place

a) at LF at the n level by an n-complement of form dp,

b) in syntax at the d level by spec-head relation between the d and np in spec(dp).