We investigate German-Russian bilingual children's sensitivity to formal and semantic cues when assigning gender to nouns in German. Across languages, young children have been shown to primarily rely on phonological cues, whereas sensitivity to semantic and syntactic cues increases with age. With its semi-transparent gender assignment system,…

Previous studies emphasized that there is a close connection between speech and thinking. The paper analyses the peripheral semantics of the German language's active vocabulary units to define how they represent the features of the national, linguistic picture of the world, namely, the mental traits of the German ethnos. Semantic methods and the…

This study investigates the hypothesis that non-isomorphic syntax-semantics mappings pose a greater challenge for non-native (L2) than for native (L1) speakers, focusing on a previously understudied phenomenon. We carried out an antecedent judgment task with L1 German and L1 Russian-speaking, proficient L2 learners of German to examine Condition C…

The dependency grammars for such languages as Russian usually treat the prepositions in combination with subordinate nouns as major elements as if the case form in the prepositional construction had some self-contained meaning subjected to the regular transformation. This scheme may be valid for languages with restricted declensional paradigms,…

Grammatical description of the sentence generation for the particular language is usually split into special morphological and Syntactical modules applied autonomously: the variance of morphological forms posed into the enumeration of constructional augmentations produces the enormous list of possible expositions of structural complexity paying no…

This research analyzed adequacy of referential expressions in the narratives of bilingual and monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical language development (TLD), aiming to shed light on the relative contribution of morpho-syntactic, discourse-pragmatic, and semantic constraints. Narratives were collected from 51…

Interest to axiosphere as the sphere of values and its correlation with the ever-progressive noosphere as sphere of knowledge of a person is due to comprehension of the modern period in the evolution of society. The aim of the article is to describe an axiological aspect of the research of identity as an element of human and language universes.…

The relevance of the presented problems due to the fact that reinterpreted the values producing the foundations and formation of the lexical meaning of the derived adjective occurs according to the laws of associative thinking and it should be explained through semantic-cognitive analysis. The goal of the article is the description and comparison…

This paper focuses on the acquisition of locative prepositional phrases in L1 Norwegian. We report on two production experiments with children acquiring Norwegian as their first language and compare the results to similar experiments conducted with Russian children. The results of the experiments show that Norwegian children at age 2 regularly…

The main goal of this dissertation is to consider the different types of indefinites in Russian as a system and provide a semantic account for each of them that would be able to naturally explain their distribution. The four sets of so-called 'indefinite pronouns' ("-to," "-nibud'," "-libo," and…

This dissertation examines the phenomenon of ethical datives (EDs) in two Slavic languages, Russian and Macedonian. EDs are defined through a pragmatic lens as discourse licensed perspective markers in which a dative form expresses a speaker's decision to signal someone's emotional attitude--real or perceived--toward the action. Owing to…

In this paper the results of an investigation of word order in Russian Sign Language (RSL) are presented. A small corpus of narratives based on comic strips by nine native signers was analyzed and a picture-description experiment (based on Volterra et al. 1984) was conducted with six native signers. The results are the following: the most frequent…

This study aims to establish whether connectives can create referential expectations in discourse, and, if so, what these expectations are based on: connective semantics or frequency distributions in language use. This was tested by comparing the processing of the connectives "and" and "but" in Dutch and Russian by means of an…

In Russian infinitives of impersonal verbs have a peculiar distribution: they are not acceptable in most syntactic contexts, but there are also syntactic contexts in which they are perfectly acceptable. Based on a qualitative analysis of data from corpora, the Internet and an acceptability survey, it is argued that the restrictions on impersonals…

Russian legal-administrative documents from the early fourteenth through the mid-seventeenth century (Middle Russian) show extensive variation in expressing possessivity within the noun phrase. Possessor expressions can be conveyed by morphologically derived possessive adjectives, adnominal genitives, or by combinations of those constructions…