No 3 (2024)

Modern formal approaches to syntax propose different underlying structures for coordinate constructions. At the same time, none of them describe the entire set of properties of coordination, including variable predicate agreement in number (and gender). The goal of the paper is to define the internal organization of coordinate phrases. As the study of examples from the Russian treebank demonstrates, in addition to the previously known factors, the choice of agreement strategy is also influenced by the linear length of conjuncts and the distance between them and the verbal head. Additionally, the strategy of matching the nearest (and not necessarily the first) conjunct is relevant for Russian. We present and analyze the corpus data and conclude that there is no hierarchical organization in coordination. This lets us elaborate on some general ideas about syntactic derivation put forward by Noam Chomsky.

The paper presents an overview of grammaticalized constructions expressing the continuative meaning ‘still do, continue doing’, attested in a number of languages of the Lezgic branch (< Nakh-Daghestanian), although enjoying very little attention from researchers. A peculiarity of four Lezgic languages is the existence of a stative verb describing continuation of existence or staying in a certain place (‘still be, remain’). It is this verb that is found as an auxiliary in continuative constructions of East Lezgic languages and Rutul; in Archi, periphrastic continuative forms are based on dedicated continuative converbs, while the auxiliary is a simple copula. In addition, I discuss the use of continuative constructions, as well as other means of expressing the continuative meaning, in parallel contexts from the Gospel of Luke translations (seven translations into six Lezgic languages were taken into account). According to cross-linguistic studies of the continuative by Panova (2021, 2023), the continuative meaning is unambiguously present in 17 contexts in the Gospel of Luke. The present paper demonstrates in which of these contexts the means of expressing the continuative meaning were most frequently used and which particular means were employed, as well as which languages explicitly express the continuative meaning more often than others. On the whole, in more than a half of all cases the continuative meaning is not expressed by an explicit grammatical or lexical means other than imperfective verb forms. At the same time, the three East Lezgic languages, as well as Rutul, make use of stative verbs meaning ‘still be, remain’, both as a lexical verb and as an auxiliary, and also of adverbs. Tsakhur and Udi, which lack dedicated continuative constructions, only use adverbs in the respective contexts, the use of adverbs in these two languages being more frequent than in languages possessing continuative constructions.

This article critically examines the hypothesis regarding the emergence of the sound [o] in the place of the expected [a] (and, accordingly, in written form, the occurrence of о in the place of the expected а) is a regular mechanism marking the informality of a word (its association with slang, colloquial language, and other non-standardized areas of the language). It shows that externally similar phenomena conceal completely different linguistic mechanisms. In particular, quite often the appearance of о is a side effect of the shifted stress in word inflection. The examples considered confirm a general principle of spell checking: slang and colloquial words cannot be used for checking. It is claimed that this principle should be taken into account in spelling guides and references.