Download Free Michigan Slavic Materials Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Michigan Slavic Materials and write the review.

The present volume offers a selection of papers on current issues in Slavic languages. It takes stock of the past 20 years of linguistic research at the Department of Slavic Studies at Leipzig University. Within these two decades, the scientific writing, teaching, and organization done in this Department strengthened the mode of research in formal description of Slavic languages, formed another center for this kind of linguistic research in the world, and brought about a remarkable amount of scientific output. The authors of this volume are former or present members of the Department of Slavic studies or academic friends. Based on the data from East, West, and South Slavic languages, the papers tackle issues of all grammatical subdisciplines in current models of description, compare parts of the grammars of Slavic languages, explain categories and phrases in Slavic languages that do not exist in present-day Indogermanic languages of Western Europe, and propose ways how to update the standard of lexicography in still less described Slavic languages. A study of language competence is dedicated to the actual requests on heritage speakers and shows how their abilities can be evaluated.
This book describes and systematizes all aspects of the grammar of Russian: the patterns of orthography, sounds, inflection, syntax, tense-aspect-mood, word order, and intonation. It is especially concerned with the meaning of combinations of words (constructions). The core concept is that of the predicate history: a record of the states of entities through time and across possibilities. Using predicate histories, the book presents an integrated account of the semantics of verbs, nouns, case, and aspect. More attention is paid to syntax than in any other grammars of Russian written in English or in other languages of Western Europe. Alan Timberlake refers to the literature on variation and trends in development, and makes use of contemporary data from the internet. This book will appeal to students, scholars and language professionals interested in Russian.
Living in one of the world's most volatile regions, the people of the Balkans have witnessed unrelenting political, economic, and social upheaval. In response, many have looked to building communities, both psychologically and materially, as a means of survival in the wake of crumbling governments and states. The foundational structures of these communities often center on the concept of individual sacrifice for the good of the whole. Many communities, however, are hijacked by restrictive ideologies, turning them into a model of intolerance and exclusion. In The Sacrificed Body, Tatjana Aleksic examines the widespread use of the sacrificial metaphor in cultural texts and its importance to sustaining communal ideologies in the Balkan region. Aleksic further relates the theme to the sanctioning of ethnic cleansing, rape, and murder in the name of homogeneity and collective identity. Aleksic begins her study with the theme of the immurement of a live female body in the foundation of an important architectural structure, a trope she finds in texts from all over the Balkans. The male builders performing the sacrificial act have been called by a higher power who will ensure the durability of the structure and hence the patriarchal community as a whole. In numerous examples ranging from literature to film and performance art, Aleksic views the theme of sacrifice and its relation to exclusion based on gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, or politics for the sake of community building. According to Aleksic, the sacrifice narrative becomes most prevalent during times of crisis brought on by wars, weak governments, foreign threats, or even globalizing tendencies. Because crisis justifies the very existence of restrictive communities, communalist ideology thrives on its perpetuation. They exist in a symbiotic relationship. Aleksic also acknowledges the emancipatory potential of a genuine community, after it has shaken off its ideological character. Aleksic employs cultural theory, sociological analysis, and human rights studies to expose a historical narrative that is predominant regionally, if not globally. As she determines, in an era of both Western and non-Western neoliberalism, elitist hegemony will continue to both threaten and bolster communities along with their segregationist tactics.
Karen Petrone shatters the notion that World War I was a forgotten war in the Soviet Union. Although never officially commemorated, the Great War was the subject of a lively discourse about religion, heroism, violence, and patriotism during the interwar period. Using memoirs, literature, films, military histories, and archival materials, Petrone reconstructs Soviet ideas regarding the motivations for fighting, the justification for killing, the nature of the enemy, and the qualities of a hero. She reveals how some of these ideas undermined Soviet notions of military honor and patriotism while others reinforced them. As the political culture changed and war with Germany loomed during the Stalinist 1930s, internationalist voices were silenced and a nationalist view of Russian military heroism and patriotism prevailed.
Clitics are grammatical elements that are treated as independent words in syntax but form a phonological unit with the word that precedes or follows it. This volume brings together the facts about clitics in the Slavic languages, where they have become a focal points of recent research. The authors draw relevant generalizations across the Slavic languages and highlight the importance of these phenomena for linguistic theory.
Focusing on issues of case theory and comparative grammar, this study treats selected problems in the syntax of the Slavic languages from the perspective of Government-Binding theory. Steven Franks seeks to develop parametric solutions to related constructions among the various Slavic languages. A model of case based loosely on Jakobson's feature system is adapted to a variety of comparative problems in Slavic, including across-the-board constructions, quantification, secondary predication, null subject phenomena, and voice. Solutions considered make use of recent approaches to phrase structure, including the VP-internal subject hypothesis and the DP hypothesis. The book will serve admirably as an introduction to GB theory for Slavic linguists as well as to the range of problems posed by Slavic for general syntacticians.
This study offers a novel approach to a longstanding problem in Slavic Linguistics, the formal representation of the Northern Russian participial constructions in -n(o)/-t(o). Unlike previous works, the methodological stance adopted by the author focuses on singling out all the relevant patterns of variation and on pursuing a unified explanation for them. The key to the solution of the puzzle is the idea that the participial affix -n-/-t- and the agreement inflections are not just pieces of morphology inserted post-syntactically, but true heads that enter the computation and are able to manipulate the argumental roles of the verb and to check the EPP. The author’s proposal is properly framed in the context of current debate on interlanguage variation.