Anastasia Smirnova

Issues in Slavic Syntax and Semantics is a collection of papers dealing with a range of syntactic and semantic phenomena across a variety of Slavic languages. The papers included in this volume were presented at the Graduate Colloquia on Slavic Linguistics held at the Ohio State University, reflecting cutting-edge research in Slavic Linguistics by a new generation of scholars from top American and European universities. Topics include the word order of noun phrases with classifying adjectives, the correlation between morphosyntactic realization and semantic roles of the nouns, semantics and syntax of subordinate imperative constructions, clausal structure and semantic properties of impersonal constructions, temporal properties of embedded subjunctive clauses, and the semantics of yes/no questions. The authors present the analyses of the studied phenomena within a variety of formal syntactic and semantic frameworks, such as the Minimalist program, semantics of events, and temporal semantics. These studies consider syntactic and semantic issues in Russian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Old Church Slavonic, Polish, and Lithuanian. In addition, some of the papers also offer diachronic analyses of the studied phenomena. Issues in Slavic Syntax and Semantics definitely will interest linguists engaged in the formal study of natural language syntax and semantics and to Slavicists generally.

The paper investigates how speakers understand constructions with deverbal nominals, i.e. nominals such as destruction that are morphologically related to verbs. Specifically, given the expression the enemy's destruction, how do the speakers decide whether the possessive argument is the entity that initiates the action (agent) or the entity that is causally affected by the event (patient)? The results of an experimental study show that this choice is dependent on the lexical semantics of the nominal. The theoretical implication is that that deverbal nominals are similar to verbs in that they have argument structure. By studying comprehension of deverbal nominals, the current study extends the scope of previous experimental work on lexical semantics that has been primarily concerned with verbs.

The paper presents a uniform analysis of the Bulgarian evidential in reportative and inferential contexts. The Bulgarian evidential is analyzed as having both a temporal and an epistemic modal component. The analysis allows to explain why the evidential can be used to report false beliefs in reportative contexts but not in inferential ones, as well as why the Bulgarian evidential cannot express inferences about the future. Both cases are problematic for the previous analyses of evidentiality in Bulgarian (Izvorski 1997, Koev 2011).

This paper addresses the question of the meaning of the present tense in Albanian and Bulgarian, and shows that the two languages exhibit a pattern of cross-linguistic variation. I show that the present tense in Bulgarian is relative, whereas the present tense in Albanian is both relative and absolute. From a Balkanological perspective, this research yields rather surprising results, especially given the fact that Albanian and Bulgarian show a number of contact-induced similarities in temporal and modal domains. From a cross-linguistic perspective, this paper complements more recent literature on temporal semantics (e.g. Ogihara 1996, Gennari 2003, Sharvit 2003, Kubota et.al. 2009), and broadens the domain of research in this area.