Suspended affixation in Ossetic and the structure of the syntax-morphology interface

I describe and analyze suspended affixation (a situation when an affix only appears on the rightmost coordinand, but takes scope over all the coordinands) of case markers in Ossetic. Based on how suspended affixation interacts with allomorphy and certain case conflicts, I propose that suspended affixation arises due to phonological deletion of exponents, and that semantic information is still available at this stage. I speculate that it is this stage of derivation that should be considered the morphological module

Typology of bizarre ellipsis varieties

This dissertation deals with the typology and analysis of several types of ellipsis that have received little or no attention so far in the literature. The theoretical goal of the dissertation is to propose analyses of sluicing and gapping that will be able to account for cross-linguistic variation in this domain. While the overall approach of the dissertation is typological, a particular focus is made upon data from Russian, Georgian (the South Caucasian language family), as well as Digor and Iron Ossetic (Iranian; Indo-European)

Suspended Affixation as Morpheme Ellipsis: Evidence from Ossetic Alternative Questions

This paper provides novel evidence that ellipsis can target bound morphemes. The evidence comes from suspended affixation of case markers in alternative questions in Digor and Iron Ossetic. The current literature on alternative questions (e.g. Does Mary like coffee or tea?) proposes that in many languages they are derived by disjunction of and ellipsis in constituents as large as a vP or even as a CP. Language-specific evidence in favor of such structure of alternative questions is available for Ossetic as well. Accordingly, the ostensible disjuncts coffee or tea do not actually form a constituent and case must be separately assigned to each of the DPs. Therefore, a case suffix shared under suspended affixation cannot attach to the orP as a whole. A deletion-based analysis can successfully derive the properties of suspended affixation in Ossetic alternative questions. I advance a specific proposal that incorporates ellipsis into the Distributed Morphology derivation

Against the universal phasehood of nP: Evidence from the morphosyntax of book titles

Languages vary as to whether DPs used as book titles (such as Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, etc.) can be assigned case and trigger agreement. In languages where they do participate in case and agreement relations, book (and movie) titles form a subsystem with very peculiar properties. I argue that when used as a title, any XP gets embedded in a new nP which projects a DP. Phasehood properties of nPs vary across languages, which leads to the variation in the agreement properties of book titles. However, even in languages that normally require lexical DP titles to trigger agreement and be assigned case, personal pronouns and other functional are exempt from this. I argue that this is related to the fact that participation in case assignment and agreement makes the index and the phi-features of a pronoun visible on the LF thus creating an interpretational conflict

Embedded questions and sluicing in Georgian and Svan

Georgian and Svan exhibit a construction similar to classical sluicing: that is, translational analogs are grammatical of sentences like ‘Mary cooked something, but I don’t know what’. I provide a description of these phenomena and show that this construction in both languages satisfies standard tests for sluicing. I show that wh-movement in Georgian targets a lower position than in, say, English, namely, Spec FocP. Accordingly, I argue that the account developed in Toosarvandani (2008) for Persian and Van Craenenbroeck & Lipták (2006, 2013) for Hungarian is applicable in this case as well. Specifically, sluicing-like constructions in Georgian are derived by movement of wh-phrases into this position and subsequent deletion of the complement of the FocP. The syntax of the Svan counterpart of this construction differs in some crucial aspects and its analysis is yet to be obtained

Chapter Towards automated language classification

In this paper, we discuss advantages of clustering approaches to automated language classification, describe distance measures used for this purpose, and present results of several proof-of-concept experiments. We advocate the use of probability based distances – those that take into account the distribution of relevant features across the language sample in questio

Topics in quantum groups and finite-type invariants: mathematics at the independent University of Moscow

This volume presents the first collection of articles consisting entirely of work by faculty and students of the Higher Mathematics College of the Independent University of Moscow (IUM). This unique institution was established to train elite students to become research scientists. Covered in the book are two main topics: quantum groups and low-dimensional topology. The articles were written by participants of the Feigin and Vassiliev seminars, two of the most active seminars at the IUM