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The paper analyses the phenomenon of infinitive loss in Balkan Slavic in the context of the broader cross-linguistic process of subjunctive-infinitive competition (SIC). I adopt a diachronic perspective, analysing the historical developments pertaining to SIC in languages ranging from Old Church Slavonic to present-day Bulgarian and Serbian. The main goal of the paper is to distinguish between those instances of Balkan-Slavic infinitive loss that are a result of broader typological processes and those that can be viewed as genuine Balkan-sprachbund innovations. The specific Balkan innovation in this context was the replacement of infinitives by finite subjunctives in obligatory subject-control environments. I analyse this diachronic development as the result of a formal reanalysis affecting the syntactic status of the Balkan-Slavic subjunctive marker, which allowed it to spread to obligatory-control structures.

The present paper argues for a view of gender agreement without either grammatical or natural gender being represented as syntactic features. Rather than deriving declension classes in terms of realisation, I postulate them as the only relevant feature that is lexically specified on the noun. Agreement copies the declension class and triggers presuppositions. When these presuppositions clash with those already active in the discourse, default agreement is realised. The paper moreover provides a quantitative analysis of semantic correlates of declension classes and a novel analysis of SC declension classes.

Theo Padnos published My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun in 2004, when Prison Studies were burgeoning and gaining academic attention globally. Neglected by critics, the book relates the author's experience as literature instructor in an American prison. Engaging methods of pedagogical research and reader-response criticism, the paper investigates the role of literature in the cultural activities of young male inmates in a medium security jail in Vermont. An original amalgam of crime reports, pedagogy of literature, and autobiographical criticism, Padnos' study for the first time confronts young criminals with a literary canon dripping with violence. The experiment sheds light on the reading activities of prisoners, on their and the author's social background, and on the power of American literature to speak to marginal groups.

Linguists argued that the Cockney dialect, in London, is expected to be replaced by Multicultural London English in the years to come. However, this does not imply that Cockney is dead, as recent research revealed that it just moved to Essex. This paper aims at examining whether (l) vocalisation, a common feature of Cockney, is still present in the London district of Bermondsey. Ten working-class English speakers, stratified by age and sex, have been recorded by means of sociolinguistic interviews. The results, discussed both quantitively and qualitatively, show that: (a) (l) vocalisation is present in all age cohorts, with young speakers favouring the non-standard feature; (b) preceding long vowels trigger (l) vocalisation.

The so-called indirect passive, where the subject is not the argument of the underlying verb that bears the Theme/Patient role, is generally understood to be a bi-clausal phenomenon (cf. Kuno 1973; Shibatani 1978; Kuroda 1979). In other words, the passive morpheme rare is merged with a clause, and then the resulting item is combined with the subject. In this paper, however, we argue that the indirect passive is best understood as a mono-clausal phenomenon. We first point out that with some instances of the indirect passive, the passive morpheme rare is not understood as being combined with a verb or clause in syntax. Thus, we are led to assume that the lexicon contains numerous instances of the Vrare form. This implies that even when the passive morpheme rare is combined in syntax, it forms a constituent with the relevant verb; hence, the indirect passive is a mono-clausal phenomenon. We furthermore maintain that when the indirect passive involves the merging of rare with a verb in syntax, the verb must be a volitional verb, and demonstrate that this generalization, as well as the case particle alternation involved in the indirect passive, poses a challenge to the bi-clause analysis but not to the mono-clause analysis. Finally, we review one of the main arguments for analyzing the indirect passive to be a bi-clausal phenomenon, which concerns the antecedent of zibun. We show that it is inconclusive at best.

The goal of this paper is to reconcile the definite marking with the indefinite-like semantics of those superlatives that take a relative/comparative reading. Following Szabolcsi (1986) and Heim (1999), we will assume that the difference between absolute and relative readings of superlatives is represented at the syntactic level of semantic representation, LF (Logical Form). We will however depart from Heim’s hypothesis that what raises at LF is the superlative operator itself (EST). We will instead assume a quantificational-determiner analysis of EST, which involves two raising operations at LF: EST-raising to Spec,DP and raising of the whole superlative DP (Determiner Phrase) to a scope position in the sentence. We will examine the relative readings of quality superlatives. The generalizations and the proposed analysis are not assumed to extend to quantity superlatives.

This paper analyses Angela Carter’s desecrating tendency to taboo-breaking in thematic and formal terms. By referring to her short-fiction production and focusing on “John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore", I intend to show how gender/patriarchal and genre/authorial taboos are similarly broken and transmuted into daringly subversive outcomes. In line with her feminist agenda and postmodern transformism, Carter superbly challenges, sabotages, violates, de- and re-constructs traditionally codified sexual and gender taboos by mimicking such reversals through new narrative solutions. If diversity, multiplicity and change guarantee the continuity of life, incest can easily metaphorise a taboo relationship based on repetition of the identical, sameness, and immobility, to be finally transformed, if not avoided. Consistent with many of her female characters’ incestuous relationships with parents or siblings, Carter also establishes incest-like relationships with previous authors and narrative discourses, which she predatorily appropriates. Carter’s resulting narrative testifies to the fact that taboos must be first experienced to be eventually broken. It is in the dialectic between rule and infraction, taboo and its violation that Carter’s writing is rooted, constantly looking for borders to be crossed.

Designed as a paper reflecting on the editorial mediation of early modern French literary texts, this article maps the educational activities conducted on the Tragiques Inventions site since 2020. In particular, it delves into the procedures linked to documenting, generating and manipulating descriptive and analytical (meta)data. A new concept of ‘hand-reading’ is being developed – the possibility of using digital technology to prioritize human intervention in the construction of knowledge through textual editing. This concept will bring a fresh perspective on early modern literary texts.

There is a substantial body of scholarship arguing for the relevance of magic realism to Toni Morrison’s fictional production, with one exception being her last novel God Help the Child, which, in that respect, has been remarkably overlooked. The present paper intends to fill this scholarly gap by focusing on what Morrison called “enchantment”, a powerful blend of magic and realism that she employed to represent a host of racial and ancestral issues of Blackness, often of a traumatic kind.

Sylvia’s Lovers is a novel about war. It is a historical novel set in the years 1793-1800 during the Napoleonic wars, and written by Elizabeth Gaskell in the years 1859-1862 when the American Civil War broke out, in April 1861. Examining Gaskell’s correspondence with Charles Eliot Norton in the years 1861-63 and the articles Norton wrote in support of the War and the anti-slavery cause, this paper explores the way in which the news coming from America and the debates on the contemporary events left a significant mark on the second part of the novel. The implied reference to the context of the American Civil War would shed new light on Gaskell’s narrative choices concerning the plot and the main male character’s development, which has been substantially overlooked.

Linguists argued that the Cockney dialect, in London, is expected to be replaced by Multicultural London English in the years to come. However, this does not imply that Cockney is dead, as recent research revealed that it just moved to Essex. This paper aims at examining whether (l) vocalisation, a common feature of Cockney, is still present in the London district of Bermondsey. Ten working-class English speakers, stratified by age and sex, have been recorded by means of sociolinguistic interviews. The results, discussed both quantitively and qualitatively, show that: (a) (l) vocalisation is present in all age cohorts, with young speakers favouring the non-standard feature; (b) preceding long vowels trigger (l) vocalisation.

The so-called indirect passive, where the subject is not the argument of the underlying verb that bears the Theme/Patient role, is generally understood to be a bi-clausal phenomenon (cf. Kuno 1973; Shibatani 1978; Kuroda 1979). In other words, the passive morpheme rare is merged with a clause, and then the resulting item is combined with the subject. In this paper, however, we argue that the indirect passive is best understood as a mono-clausal phenomenon. We first point out that with some instances of the indirect passive, the passive morpheme rare is not understood as being combined with a verb or clause in syntax. Thus, we are led to assume that the lexicon contains numerous instances of the Vrare form. This implies that even when the passive morpheme rare is combined in syntax, it forms a constituent with the relevant verb; hence, the indirect passive is a mono-clausal phenomenon. We furthermore maintain that when the indirect passive involves the merging of rare with a verb in syntax, the verb must be a volitional verb, and demonstrate that this generalization, as well as the case particle alternation involved in the indirect passive, poses a challenge to the bi-clause analysis but not to the mono-clause analysis. Finally, we review one of the main arguments for analyzing the indirect passive to be a bi-clausal phenomenon, which concerns the antecedent of zibun. We show that it is inconclusive at best.

The goal of this paper is to reconcile the definite marking with the indefinite-like semantics of those superlatives that take a relative/comparative reading. Following Szabolcsi (1986) and Heim (1999), we will assume that the difference between absolute and relative readings of superlatives is represented at the syntactic level of semantic representation, LF (Logical Form). We will however depart from Heim’s hypothesis that what raises at LF is the superlative operator itself (EST). We will instead assume a quantificational-determiner analysis of EST, which involves two raising operations at LF: EST-raising to Spec,DP and raising of the whole superlative DP (Determiner Phrase) to a scope position in the sentence. We will examine the relative readings of quality superlatives. The generalizations and the proposed analysis are not assumed to extend to quantity superlatives.

This paper analyses Angela Carter’s desecrating tendency to taboo-breaking in thematic and formal terms. By referring to her short-fiction production and focusing on “John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore", I intend to show how gender/patriarchal and genre/authorial taboos are similarly broken and transmuted into daringly subversive outcomes. In line with her feminist agenda and postmodern transformism, Carter superbly challenges, sabotages, violates, de- and re-constructs traditionally codified sexual and gender taboos by mimicking such reversals through new narrative solutions. If diversity, multiplicity and change guarantee the continuity of life, incest can easily metaphorise a taboo relationship based on repetition of the identical, sameness, and immobility, to be finally transformed, if not avoided. Consistent with many of her female characters’ incestuous relationships with parents or siblings, Carter also establishes incest-like relationships with previous authors and narrative discourses, which she predatorily appropriates. Carter’s resulting narrative testifies to the fact that taboos must be first experienced to be eventually broken. It is in the dialectic between rule and infraction, taboo and its violation that Carter’s writing is rooted, constantly looking for borders to be crossed.

Designed as a paper reflecting on the editorial mediation of early modern French literary texts, this article maps the educational activities conducted on the Tragiques Inventions site since 2020. In particular, it delves into the procedures linked to documenting, generating and manipulating descriptive and analytical (meta)data. A new concept of ‘hand-reading’ is being developed – the possibility of using digital technology to prioritize human intervention in the construction of knowledge through textual editing. This concept will bring a fresh perspective on early modern literary texts.

There is a substantial body of scholarship arguing for the relevance of magic realism to Toni Morrison’s fictional production, with one exception being her last novel God Help the Child, which, in that respect, has been remarkably overlooked. The present paper intends to fill this scholarly gap by focusing on what Morrison called “enchantment”, a powerful blend of magic and realism that she employed to represent a host of racial and ancestral issues of Blackness, often of a traumatic kind.

Theo Padnos published My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun in 2004, when Prison Studies were burgeoning and gaining academic attention globally. Neglected by critics, the book relates the author's experience as literature instructor in an American prison. Engaging methods of pedagogical research and reader-response criticism, the paper investigates the role of literature in the cultural activities of young male inmates in a medium security jail in Vermont. An original amalgam of crime reports, pedagogy of literature, and autobiographical criticism, Padnos' study for the first time confronts young criminals with a literary canon dripping with violence. The experiment sheds light on the reading activities of prisoners, on their and the author's social background, and on the power of American literature to speak to marginal groups.

Sylvia’s Lovers is a novel about war. It is a historical novel set in the years 1793-1800 during the Napoleonic wars, and written by Elizabeth Gaskell in the years 1859-1862 when the American Civil War broke out, in April 1861. Examining Gaskell’s correspondence with Charles Eliot Norton in the years 1861-63 and the articles Norton wrote in support of the War and the anti-slavery cause, this paper explores the way in which the news coming from America and the debates on the contemporary events left a significant mark on the second part of the novel. The implied reference to the context of the American Civil War would shed new light on Gaskell’s narrative choices concerning the plot and the main male character’s development, which has been substantially overlooked.

The paper examines the clitic mu ‘it’, an inanimate non-core (3rd singular neuter) Dative pronominal in Serbian, which behaves as a typical expletive (‘dummy’) pronoun in not having an antecedent in the previous discourse or available for deictic reference, and whose main pragmatic contribution is ‘objectivization’ – it implies that the truth value of a given proposition is not to be seen as a subjective ‘judgment’ of the evaluator (the speaker by default). We argue that this ‘expletive’ Dative is a situation pronoun referring to an arbitrary situation different from both the Topic Situation of a given clause and the situation hosting the Speaker, generated in a point-of-view projection at the T–C edge. The analysis explains the ‘objectivization’ effect straightforwardly: by switching the evaluation domain from a Topic Situation, it is indicated that the proposition is not evaluated by any of the referents to whom the Topic Situation is relevant, most prominently the speaker as default evaluator and source of information. On a broader theoretical level, the analysis of the pronominal clitic mu ‘it’ provides support against treating (non-core) animacy/sentience as the core property of (non-core) Datives, as well as support for eliminating ‘expletiveness’ as a relevant concept in grammar.

The present paper gives a description of the forms and functions of the imperfect in Resian, a Slovene-based micro-language spoken in northern Italy, which has been in a situation of language contact with Romance varieties for centuries. The comparison between the imperfects found in the oldest documents (eighteenth and nineteenth century) and those used in modern Resian shows a significant shift of its functions. The imperfect, in fact, has lost its original aspect-temporal values, now expressing mainly counterfactuality and the future in the past. Our analysis includes a discussion on the possible role of foreign influence in these developments.

This paper discusses case syncretism patterns in Albanian, arguing for an underlyingly syntactic (i.e. functional) motivation for seemingly ʻmorphomicʼ (i.e. purely formal) metasyncretism patterns in its nominal inflection. It is argued that the distribution of syncretized and non-syncretized forms in the Albanian nominal paradigm is motivated by language economy in such a way that syncretism is used to produce an ʻoptimalʼ distribution of formally distinct case forms, so that the syncretized forms are always in complementary distribution w. r. t. their syntactic functions, and only the minimal necessary number of morphologically different forms remains in the paradigm. From a purely morphological point of view, this creates seemingly ʻmorphomicʼ patterns, in which, as a rule, syncretized forms do not form a natural class. However, these particular syncretism patterns are motivated in fact by the underlying functional ʻneedsʼ (or the lack thereof) of the nominal morphosyntax, so that the distribution of syncretized and non-syncretized forms in the Albanian nominal inflectional paradigm is, in fact, entirely motivated by the division of labour between case and definiteness in the syntax.

This paper demonstrates the applicability of a cognitive lexical semantic analysis to some of the meanings of the highly polysemous Bulgarian preposition na. It proposes an account of the various senses of na as a radial (conceptual) category with a prototypical sense and various extensions referred to as lexical concepts in the Principled Polysemy Approach developed by Tyler and Evans. Similarly, it is argued that, in addition to the spatio-geometric parameters, the core spatial lexical concept of the Bulgarian na includes also functional information from which non-spatial meanings such as ‘active state’ derive.

An in-depth analysis of two distinct linguistic elements (lexical and toponymic) of Latin origin in the modern Ukrainian language adds some important elements to the study of the direct contacts of proto-Slavic populations and cultures with Roman civilisation in the early centuries of the first millennium. The paper examines ancient Latin loanwords in modern Ukrainian, in comparison with other Slavic languages and focuses on the question of Roman influences on the toponymy of Ukraine. Considering the difficulties linked to the temporal distance and the genetic diversity between late Latin and modern Ukrainian, these linguistic phenomena are correlated with historical, archaeological, numismatic data (as materially attested), in order to frame the linguistic question in the respective historical context, and at the same time to highlight the lexical connections and cultural continuity with the late Latin period.

In this paper aspects of the sibilant system in the variety spoken in the Germanic language island Sauris/Zahre in north-eastern Italy are presented. I investigate whether an intermediate, postalveolar “shibilant” (from Protogermanic */s/) in preconsonantal position is preserved from Middle High German as observed in other German minority languages in northern Italy. In Sauris/Zahre, in preconsonantal position a postalveolar realization is sometimes mentioned in literature, while in Modern Standard German and most related varieties in this position historical, postalveolar */s/ is retracted to palatoalveolar /ʃ/.

In Ukrainian, the possessive resultative passive is represented by subject constructions that are comprised of the verb maty (to have) and passive participle (e.g. maju zapysani pisni ‘I have written songs’, mala naskladano troxy hroshey ‘she had saved some money’ etc.). These constructions, which are a grammatical norm in West Slavic, Macedonian, and Bulgarian, are an innovation in Ukrainian that has not been investigated enough. In this paper three models of the possessive resultative passive construction are differentiated. The degrees of their presence in Ukrainian are different. My linguistic data shows that some varieties of the possessive resultative passive construction are productive in the colloquial language, as well as in the electronic and technical discourses in Ukrainian.

Albanian plural morphology is analysed in the paper as split between the Num and n heads. This is shown to result diachronically from a plural-to-singular reanalysis cycle, where splitting the number morphology between Num and n has worked as a competition resolution strategy in Albanian. The system is still in transition, however, and represents a long-lasting state of a dynamic equilibrium.

The paper deals with the Russian theme vowels that can be regarded as derivational suffixes, in particular, with e- and i-vowels. The former derives emission verbs or inchoative verbs, whereas the latter derives causatives (both dynamic and stative), unergative behaviour-related verbs, and some others. I propose a uniform explanation of the fact that the same theme vowel can give rise to different structural types of verbs. I argue that, semantically, the best way to capture the differences between the two vowels is to implement the Ramchand’s model of predicate decomposition, where e-vowel encodes the process sub-event and i-vowel the initial sub-event.

This paper discusses the context of script choice (Latin and Cyrillic) in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the late 1920s and early 1930s, focusing on bialphabetism and biliteracy as official policies of the country. I place the topic in the framework of Latinization in the interwar period and examine three texts by Yugoslav authors that propose a ‘hybrid’ writing system containing the characters of both alphabets as a solution to digraphia. It then explores some reactions to such proposals, including the one of Aleksander Belić. The article is based on the analysis of previously unknown sources found in the Matica Srpska Library in Novi Sad.

The paper is devoted to a critical analysis of the traditional etymology of the Proto-Slavic word with the meaning ‘wound’ (OCS ‘рана’ πληγή, μάστιξ; Bulgarian ‘ра́на’; Serbocroatian ‘ра̏на’, Russian ‘рана’ etc.). Researchers usually compare it to OInd. vraṇá- ‘wound, ulcer’ and Alb. varrë ‘wound’. It is demonstrated that this etymology is unacceptable from a formal point of view. Therefore, it is proposed to return to the idea of P. Persson who connected the Proto-Slavic ‘wound’ to the Proto-Indo-European root *h2erH- ‘to destroy’ and the following cognates in other branches of PIE: Hett. ḫarrai ‘grinds’; Toch. AB ār, pret. B āra ‘to stop, to cease’ and Proto-Slavic *oriti ‘to destroy, to ruin’. In this case the Proto-Slavic reconstruction is *őrna.

The main point of this paper is to describe, discuss and analyse multilingual practices of non-Russian migrants from the former Soviet Union from a translanguaging perspective uncovering language ideologies underpinning these practices. Using data collected through a 3-month linguistic ethnography supplemented by linguistic analysis of informal online communication, the Author found that fluid, translingual practices are generally not characteristic for the majority of well-educated post-Soviet migrants. Instead, we observe in the normative linguistic behaviour a lack of need or unwillingness to cross language boundaries and create hybrid linguistic forms.

The influence of loubok (Russian popular print) on Dostoevsky’s works is a topic deserving more attention than has been given up to now. It makes us understand how Dostoevsky got inspiration from popular iconography. The present article could be a further contribution to this research topic; its aim being to investigate the recurrence in Dostoevsky’s poetics of a particular typology of popular print, showing how a wife beats her husband after he came back home drunk. This loubok spread widely through Russia (the peasant family version) and Germany (the cobbler version). In particular the German version, which had a wide readership thanks to the German printer G. Renner and was named “Der Blaue Montag” was undoubtedly known to Dostoevsky, since it was widespread in the very period he travelled through Germany. In this paper I will try to show how the Russian novelist caught not only the general setting but also some details from this version to describe Marmeladov’s home in the scene (I, 2) when he comes back home and faces a violent welcome from his wife Katerina Ivanovna.