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…

This study presents a comparative analysis of the clausal architecture and sentential negation in East (Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian), West, Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Upper and Lower Sorbian), and South (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, and Slovenian) languages. Using the Minimalist Program, I analyze the syntactic structure…

The languages of the world encode possession in a variety of ways. In Slavic languages, possession on the level of the clause, or predicative possession, is represented by two main encoding strategies. Most Slavic languages, including those in the West and South Slavic sub-groupings, use a "have" verb comparable to English have and German "haben."…

In discussing the views of leading linguistics on the specific features of Slavic negation, the author reviews mainly Czech material and compares it with Russian and English works. This paper is part of a larger work on negation in which it is argued that a language system is a dynamic system based on oppositions (with predominant binary…

A discussion of transitive and intransitive verbs in Russian leads to the conclusion that the question of transitivity rests primarily with the meaning of the verb itself and with the resulting amenability to passive transformation. (Author/RM)

This paper demonstrates the means which Russian has to render English where the use of articles if required. The author concentrates on the function of the pronoun, preposition, and adverb which modify the Russian sentence. Numerous examples of English phrases and statements are provided in the target language. (RL)

The cardinal aim of this paper is to demonstrate interrelationships between patterns of social behavior and patterns of terminology. The author postulates that the terminology significantly symbolizes behavioral patterns and proceeds to examine the relationship of Russian kinship terminology and social structure in the context of a pre-industrial…

Investigates the fate of "u"-stem endings in Slavic languages. Findings indicate that the collapse of a paradigm is gradual and that the morphemes involved do not lose their grammatical meanings, although they may develop additional ones at later stages. The development of additional grammatical meanings is carried out in concert with…

This collection of 14 papers and articles by Roman Jakobson contains works written and published between 1931 and 1970 which deal either with global aspects of language or with specific grammatical issues. The collection emphasizes Jakobson's concern for finding the links between form and meaning in language. The text is entirely in German with…

This paper describes predicate adjective usage in modern standard Russian using a corpus of written Russian derived from "Pravda" (neutral literary style) and "Krokodil" (conversational material). The short, long nominative, and instrumental forms are examined in relation to the type of adjective, copulative verb, sentence subject, and other…

This paper examines the formal means by which Czech distinguishes transitive and intransitive verbs, and specifically the role of the particle "se" in the process usually called "derived intransitivization.""Se" is shown to perform a number of functions which preclude its being called simply an "intransitivizing…

This paper presents a preliminary sketch of the evolution of Russian kinship from the reconstructed stages of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Slavic, through old and nineteenth century Russian, to the trends of contemporary modern Russian. Linguistic, historical, and anthropological approaches have been combined. The kinship terminology is viewed as…

A bibliography of brief annotations of instructional materials for the Russian language includes 93 documents from the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), and the Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS), that do not go out of print and are widely available in depository systems.…