The lexical and superlexical verbal prefix iz- and its role in the stacking of prefixes

Miličević, Nataša

doi:10.7557/12.70

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Milićević (2004) talks about two distinct iz-prefixes in Serbian, a lexical and a superlexical one, and the ability of suffixes to stack in between the two leads to the conclusion that a more elaborate event structure would be necessary for a complete analysis. Istratkova (2004) discusses a similar case of prefix stacking in Bulgarian, and arrives to the conclusion that the fixed order of superlexical prefixes is reminiscent of Cinque's (1999) adverb hierarchy.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unifying Prepositions and Prefixes in Russian: Conceptual structure versus syntax

Tolskaya

2007

NLY

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This paper is an attempt to unify the polysemous verbal prefixes and prepositions in Russian. At first glance, the variety of possible denotations of a given prefix might appear a chaotic set of idiomatic meanings, e.g., the prefix za-may refer to beginning of an action, movement to a position behind an object, a brief deviation from a path, completion of an action, while the corresponding preposition za can mean 'behind,' 'after,' 'for,' 'in' (like in 'in an hour'), 'at' (like in 'at the table').I will propose a unified analysis, where the differences in meaning are claimed to arise from different syntactic positions, while the lexical entry of a prefix remains the same. The main focus is on the verbs of motion due to the consistent duality displayed by the prefix meanings when added to directional and non-directional motion verbs. It will turn out that many prefixes appear to modify path when added onto a directional motion verb and to refer to movement in time with non-directional motion verbs. This semantic distinction corresponds to distinct sets of syntactic properties, specific for each set of prefixes. These two classes of prefixes correspond to the lexical versus superlexical distinction. However, a tripartite division will emerge in each set, corresponding to source, path, and goal of motion (FROM, VIA and TO) for lexical prefixes and to initiation, process and result for superlexical prefixes. This leads to the suggestion that the syntactic representation of a VP contains at least six distinct nodes for the Russian verbal prefixes, each characterized by predictable semantic and syntactic properties. The same prefix with a consistent meaning, shared with the corresponding preposition, will receive part of its denotation from the syntactic head it attaches to, thus allowing the polysemy to arise from position, rather than from arbitrary homophony. Thus, conceptual structure will be unified with syntax.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unifying Prepositions and Prefixes in Russian: Conceptual structure versus syntax

Tolskaya

2007

NLY

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“…(37) a. sluš-a-n-je hear-THV-PASS.PTCP-NMLZ 'listening/hearing' In (38), I assume that aspectual markers can be either vP-internal or vP external (Svenonius 2004;Mili cevi c 2004;inter alia). The fact that perfectivizing prefixes can produce lexicalized meanings (37a-b) is taken as a signal of their position below the categorizing head.…”

Section: Analysis: the Link Between Eventivity And Phasehoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the internal structure of Serbian -(n)je nominalizations

Kovačević

2021

ALing

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The paper deals with the internal syntactic structure of deverbal -nje nominals in Serbian. The tests from the licensing of event-related modifiers (by-phrases and instrumental DPs) support the hypothesis that -nje nominals are derived from passive participles by adding the suffix -je (Marvin 2002; Simonović & Arsenijević 2014). Building on Simonović & Arsenijević (2014), I further observe that the licensing of referential and non-referential event modifiers exhibits a complex set of correlations with the aspectual properties of the base, phonological faithfulness to the base, and semantic compositionality. Semantic opacity and phonological unfaithfulness do not always go hand in hand, and I treat them as two separate components of a process of lexicalization, which is syntactically constrained (Marantz 1997). I argue that the presence of full VoiceP structure including a v0 referring to an event diagnosed by the licensing of referential event modifiers (Alexiadou et al. 2014) constitutes a phase, which blocks lexicalization. This structure is present in -nje nominals derived from secondary imperfectives, which always license referential event modifiers and exhibit semantic compositionality and phonological unfaithfulness. Smaller structures derived from perfectives or primary imperfectives do not license referential event modifiers (hence, they do not constitute a full phase), which is what makes them susceptible to lexicalization.

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“…Although semantic and syntactic regularities related to different ThVs are observed in the literature, they are usually only briefly reported, without extensive analyses. For instance, it has been noted that Slavic verbs with different ThVs correlate with different argument and/or aspectual properties (Svenonius 2004a: 181-185;Milićević 2004;Romanova 2004;Gribanova 2013: 131-133;Kagan 2016a: 33), but the correlation is in most cases described as tendential, and no systematic explanations are offered. The most articulated proposals of syntactic and semantic analysis of ThVs come from the approaches coached within Nanosyntax and those broadly compatible with nanosyntactic architecture (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What differentiates Serbo-Croatian verbal theme vowels: content or markedness?

Milosavljević

Arsenijević

2022

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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We examine two hypotheses regarding the role of theme vowels (ThVs) in Serbo- Croatian (SC): (i) that the various ThVs attested in SC are markedness-based realizations of the same syntactic feature specification, and (ii) that different ThVs carry different syntactic features. We focus on the two SC ThVs occurring with the highest number of bases: <a, a> and <i, i> (the ordered pair specifies the infinitive-stem and the present-tense-stem realization of the ThV). We show that if these ThVs are to be distinguished by feature specification, the best fitting analysis has <a, a> bearing only the categorial verbal feature, while <i, i> is additionally specified for the feature [SCALE], which contributes scalarity to the verbal predicate (Hay et al. 1999; Kennedy & Levin 2008). A corpus-based exploration shows that the stronger hypothesis (ii) encounters problems, the most obvious being that the regularities are only tendential, with a significant number of exceptions. If the ThVs carried different features, they would be expected to yield systematic patterns. We conclude that the weaker alternative (i) provides an empirically more accurate account and propose a specific model where at the interface with phonology, the aggregate degree of markedness of the context in which the ThV is realized is computed from a set of markedness hierarchies of the relevant phonological and semantic properties of that context (the latter mediated by the corresponding syntactic features). A mapping of the aggregate degree of markedness onto the morphological markedness hierarchy of ThVs determines the realization.

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The lexical and superlexical verbal prefix iz- and its role in the stacking of prefixes

Cited by 7 publications

References 6 publications

Unifying Prepositions and Prefixes in Russian: Conceptual structure versus syntax

Unifying Prepositions and Prefixes in Russian: Conceptual structure versus syntax

On the internal structure of Serbian -(n)je nominalizations

What differentiates Serbo-Croatian verbal theme vowels: content or markedness?

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