Journal of Slavic Linguistics 

About: Journal of Slavic Linguistics is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Slavic languages & Verb. It has an ISSN identifier of 1068-2090. Over the lifetime, 192 publications have been published receiving 1401 citations. The journal is also known as: Journal of the Slavic Linguistics Society & JSL.

Incomplete Acquisition American Russian

Abstract: This paper has two main goals: (i) to provide a description of the language of incomplete learners of Russian living in the U.S. and (ii) to identify across-the-board differences between a full language and an incompletely learned language. Most data used here come from American Russian, a reduced and reanalyzed version of Russian spoken in the U.S. by those speakers who became English-dominant in childhood. Incomplete acquirers of Russian demonstrate significant intra-group variation, which corresponds to similar variation found among incomplete learners of other languages. However, there are a number of structural properties that are shared by American Russian speakers regardless of their proficiency level and that distinguish their language from the baseline variety of Russian. American Russian therefore cannot be defined solely on geographical grounds; it differs significantly from varieties of Russian spoken by subjects who maintain language competence appropriate to uninterrupted acquisition. The paper also demonstrates a correlation between vocabulary deficiency and gaps in the grammar of American Russian. Such a correlation suggests a compact method of estimating incomplete acquirers' proficiency based on a concise lexical test. 1. Introduction This paper examines the morphosyntactic consequences of incomplete acquisition for language structure. (1) Let me say from the outset that the descriptive aspect of this paper is unquestionably its most important one, as incompletely acquired languages have received little coverage in linguistic literature, and I hope that this paper will serve to fill a small part of that gap. In addition to describing an incompletely acquired system, I address the interaction between language-particular and cross-linguistic phenomena under incomplete acquisition. I also demonstrate the correlation between lexical attrition on the one hand, and attrition in morphology and syntax on the other. This correlation allows me to propose a vocabulary-based method of measuring language attrition. The crucial data introduced here come from instances of lexical, morphological, and syntactic attrition as they occur in one particular language, American Russian. American Russian is compared to the full version of Modern Russian. As the two languages are compared, it becomes clear that American Russian is not just an offshoot of the Russian spoken in the language metropoly (the place where Russian is the sole or dominant language). Rather, it is a language in its own right, and while some of its properties may be viewed as caricatures of the trends already apparent in the language of the metropoly, many other traits are idiosyncratic and cannot be derived from the full version of Modern Russian. The paper has the following structure: in Section 2 I discuss the basic concepts used in the paper, introduce the elicitation techniques used in this study, and describe the speakers of American Russian interviewed for this study. Some salient lexical properties of American Russian are reviewed in Section 3. Section 4 presents and analyzes structural characteristics of American Russian in nominal morphology, and Section 5 discusses verbal categories. Section 6 summarizes the main characteristics of American Russian in syntax and discourse. Section 7 demonstrates the correlation between lexical and morphological/syntactic attrition, concluding that the proposed method of measuring lexical proficiency can reveal the general level of language competence. The major findings of the paper are summarized in the conclusion. 2. American Russianad Its Spedcers 2.1. Baic Notion This paper examines American Russian, a language variety that is endangered in that it is unlikely to stay around for generations, but does not come to mind as obviously endangered because it is associated with the healthy varieties of Russian spoken in Russia and in the growing Russian diaspora. …

Language Conflict in Post-Soviet Linguistic Landscapes

Abstract: In this article it is argued that the study of linguistic landscapes (public uses of written language) can benefit from viewing them as dynamic phenomena and examining them in a diachronic context. Based on the changes in the post-Soviet space since 1991, five processes are identified and examined with regard to language change and language conflict. It is further argued that the study of linguistic landscape offers a useful tool for post-Soviet sociolinguistics and for Slavic sociolinguistics at large, and examples are provided of the insights afforded by such inquiry.

Voicing in Russian Stops: Cross-Linguistic Implications

Abstract: This paper presents the results of an investigation of voicing in utterance-initial and intervocalic stops in monolingual Russian speakers. Prevoicing was found in over 97% of the lenis stops; over 97% of the intervocalic stops were fully voiced. Utterance-initial fortis stops were pronounced as voiceless unaspirated and had short positive VOT. Intervocalic fortis stops were completely voiceless except for a short voicing tail into closure. These results are relevant for typological studies of voicing. Some studies of languages with a two-way contrast between initial stops with prevoicing and short lag VOT have reported that prevoicing is less robust than what might be expected. These findings have been attributed to influence from another language without prevoicing. Our results with monolingual speakers of Russian support these claims. Our results are also relevant for the debate about the laryngeal feature in aspirating languages, which often have some voicing of intervocalic lenis stops. Such voicing has been attributed to passive voicing, in contrast with active voicing that occurs in true voice languages such as Russian. We found that the voicing in Russian is much more robust than the intervocalic voicing in aspirating languages. This difference is explained if the features of contrast are different in the two types of languages: [voice] in the case of Russian and [spread glottis] in the case of aspirating languages.

The Evolution of Sibilants in Polish and Russian

Abstract: paper we provide an account of the historical development of Polish and Russian sibilants. The arguments provided here are of theoretical interest because they show that (i) certain allophonic rules are driven by the need to keep contrasts perceptually distinct, (ii) (un- conditioned) sound changes result from needs of perceptual distinctiveness, and (iii) percept- ual distinctiveness can be extended to a class of consonants, i.e. the sibilants. The analysis is cast within Dispersion Theory, and we provide phonetic and typological data supporting the perceptual distinctivenss claims we make.

The Morphosyntax of Polish and Ukrainian -No/-to *

Abstract: . This paper provides a detailed description of the Polish and Ukrainian -no/-to + accusative construction, with considerable attention paid to how the t1vo constructions differ and to their relevance for current morphological and syntactic theory. It is argued that Polish and Ukrainian -wl-to differ with respect to where the word-final /-no/-to/ affix is generated in the narrow syntax. A wide range of seemingly unrelated syntactic properties follow from this single claim. In the case of Polish -no/-to, it is shown that the wordfinal affix is not voice-altering, but rather generated in the head of a higher Aux projection. A separationist view of Morphology is adopted in which the stem and affix are joined post-syntactically. Ukrainian -dol-to is a genuine passive. This construction is related more generally to a class of accusative-Case-marked unaccusatives. Here it is shown that a Tense projection impoverished for agreement ([empty set]-incomplete T) is a necessary (and surprising) condition for unaccusatives to appear with ACC-Case-marked complements. 1. Introduction Polish and Ukrainian -no/-to have received considerable attention in the general linguistics literature on passivization due to the typologicalIy-rare Case-Theoretic and distributional properties of these constructions. (1) Polish and Ukrainian -no/-to are treated as "exotic" passives because they take an ACC complement, flouting Burzio's Generalization, which states that a verb Case-marks its object only if it [theta]-marks its subject (Burzio 1986:178; Chomsky 1986:139). (2) The "exotic" distributional property of Polish -no/-to (under a passive analysis) is its occurrence with unaccusative and raising verbs, flouting Perlmutter and Postal's (1984a) 1-Advancement Exclusiveness Law (1-AEX) of Relational Grammar and Marantz's (1984) prohibition on vacuous dethematization. Given the surface homophony of the word-final morphology and the fact that the participle's complement appears in the ACC Case, it is tempting to view Polish and Ukrainian -no/-to as two instances of the same phenomenon. Note, for example, the sentences in (1-2): (3) (1) Polish a. Znaleziono niemowle w koszu. [found.sub.-NO] [baby.sub.ACC] in basket 'They found a baby in a basket.' b. Wsadzono cudzoziemca do wiezienia. [placed.sub.-NO] [foreigner.sub.ACC] to prison 'They put a foreigner in prison.' c. Wzieto zolnierzy do wojska. [taken.sub.-TO] [soldiers.sub.ACC] to army 'They drafted soldiers into the army.' (2) Ukrainian a. Nemovlja bulo znajdeno u kosyku. [baby.sub.ACC] [AUX.sub.PAST] [found.sub.-NO] in basket 'A baby was found in a basket.' b. Inozemcja bulo posadzeno [foreigner.sub.ACC] [AUX.sub.PAST] [placed.sub.-NO] do v'jaznyci. to prison 'A foreigner was put in prison.' (2) c. Naresti cju mohylu bude finally this [grave.sub.ACC] [AUX.sub.FUT] vzjato pid oxoronu [taken.sub.TO] under protection derzavy. of state 'Finally this grave will come under the protection of the state.' [adapted from Wieczorek 1994:16] However, despite the apparent similarity between -no/-to in the two languages, observe the following differences in these examples: (i) the [PRO.sub.arb] interpretation in Polish versus the passive reading in Ukrainian; (ii) the absence of tense-marking auxiliaries in the Polish construction only; and (iii) variation between the two languages with respect to neutral word order. Since it is already widely believed that the Polish and Ukrainian -no/-to constructions do not constitute a unified phenomenon (see Billings and Maling 1995, Franks 1995, and Lavine 2000 and 2002), (4) {the main empirical goal of this paper is to characterize how exactly the cognate constructions differ. …