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  • Author or Editor: Pavel Caha x
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Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the Russian declension in Nanosyntax (Starke 2009, 2018). The analysis has two theoretically important aspects. First, it makes no reference to language-particular declension features. This allows one to maintain the idea that morphosyntactic features are drawn from a set provided by the UG, i.e., language invariant. The analysis also does not use contextual rules. In order to correctly pair the right ending with a particular root, the analysis only relies on specifying each marker for the features it spells out. The correct pairing of roots and affixes falls out from such a specification and the Nanosyntax model of spellout.

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This paper argues that Czech verbal prefixes alternate between two states, roughly corresponding to the traditional notions ‘free’ and ‘bound’. The distinction, however, is not reflected in the separability of the prefix and the verb; it is reflected in vowel length. Main evidence for the claim is drawn from the way vowel length of adpositions is treated Czech internally and from a comparison to Norwegian. Theoretically, we implement the alternation as a phrasal movement of the prefix from a VP internal position (where the prefix behaves as bound) to a VP external position, drawing on Taraldsen’s (2000) proposal for Norwegian and Svenonius’s (2004b) account of prefixation in Slavic.

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Abstract

It is commonly assumed that basic cardinal numerals such as English three are simplex expressions whose primary function is to quantify over entities denoted by the modified NP (e.g., Kennedy 2015; Rothstein 2017; Ionin & Matushansky 2018). In this paper, we explore cross-linguistic marking patterns suggesting that cardinals in fact lexicalize complex syntactic and semantic structures derived from the primitive notion of the number scale. The evidence we will investigate comes from various morphological shapes of cardinal numerals when used to count objects and when used for abstract arithmetical counting.

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