The poetry as reliable evidence of linguistic phenomena

Many linguists refuse to believe that poetic and especially metrical - texts can provide reliable evidence of linguistic phenomena. In this article, I show that the Medieval Greek poetry represents an exception. By means of a case-study I demonstrate that the metre of the does not constitute a straitjacket for the language, but actually presents a flexible system: a comparison of the distribution of the object clitic pronouns (OCP) in the two parallel manuscripts in which the 14th century Chronicle of Morea has been preserved not only confirms the established rules for OCP distribution but also reveals that the allows many rephrasing possibilities on all levels of grammar (phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax)

To be or not to be elided: VP ellipsis revisited

The main question that this paper addresses is: what happens to non-finite auxiliaries under English VP ellipsis (VPE)? Do they remain overt like finite auxiliaries, or do they disappear together with lexical verbs? Akmajian and Wasow (1975) and Sag (1976) observed the following pattern: non-finite have always stays overt, being is obligatorily elided, and be and been are optionally elided. We provide an analysis for this pattern. As preliminaries for our account we follow Chomsky (1993) and Lasnik (1995b) in assuming that English auxiliaries carry uninterpretable inflectional features which force the auxiliary to raise to the relevant inflectional head for feature checking at PF. As we argue that VPE includes the progressive projections in the ellipsis site, but nothing higher, the have and being data automatically fall out: have is base-generated outside the ellipsis site, so is never elided, whilst being’s landing site is inside the ellipsis site, so being is always elided. For be and been, which are base-generated in the ellipsis site and raise out of it to get their inflectional features checked, we take an optional raising approach: in non-elliptical sentences raising is obligatory, otherwise the derivation crashes at PF because of unchecked features. Ellipsis contexts, on the other hand, provide the option of not raising for be and been, because ellipsis then deletes be and been in their base positions, along with their unchecked features, avoiding the PF violation. We extend this account to other phenomena, such as VP fronting, pseudo-clefts and predicate inversion.status: publishe

Null-Subject Properties of Slavic Languages

In the series Slavonic Contributions Slavic dissertations of German-speaking countries as well as occasionally also American, English and Russian are published. In addition, the series provides a forum for anthologies and monographs of established scientists

AAVE and its Presence In and Influence On Rap Music

This project starts by placing the African American Vernacular English in its historical and cultural context before analyzing its main features. These form the main foundations of the current music industry, especially in the rap and hip-hop genre. Once its origins and characteristics are analyzed, contemporary issues such as appropriation will be discussed. On this matter, white rappers, like Vanilla Ice or Eminem, represent a breaking point of African American discrimination in the mass media, and the starting point of a music era characterized by artists sounding black in their songs.Este proyecto comienza situando el dialecto African American Vernacular English en su contexto histórico y cultural antes de analizar sus características principales. Estas constituyen los cimientos de la industria musical actual, particularmente del género rap e hip-hop. Una vez analizados sus orígenes y característica, se analizarán cuestiones contemporáneas como la apropiación. Sobre este asunto, raperos blancos, como Vanilla Ice o Eminem, representan un punto crítico de la discriminación afroamericana en los medios de difusión, y el punto de partida de un periodo musical caracterizado por artistas que suenan como negros en sus canciones