Program

Boundedness and the object case marking associated with it is a complete grammatical phenomenon in Finnish and it has been the topic of a huge amount of research during numerous decades since the end of the 19th century. On the one hand, boundedness can be engendered by quantificational factors (i.e. whether or not the referent of the object is affected in its entirety). Thus, the event expressed by the clause Liisa sö-i mansiko-i-ta (Liisa.NOMINATIVE eat-PAST.3SG strawberry-PL-PARTITIVE ‘Liisa ate (some) strawberries’) is interpreted quantificationally unbounded. On the other hand, boundedness can be engendered by aspectual factors (and whether the action had the intended outcome), e.g. Liisa ampu-i lehmä-n (Liisa.NOM shoot-PST.3SG cow-ACCUSATIVE ‘Liisa shot a cow (and the cow was killed)’ vs Liisa ampu-i lehmä-ä (Liisa.NOM shoot-PST.3SG cow-PART ‘Liisa shot (at) a cow (but it didn’t die)’). Nonetheless, the two types of boundedness, quantificational and aspectual, are intertwined in Finnish syntax in an intriguing way.

I am especially interested in the object case marking in a Finnish verb structure called the Projected Directive Construction (henceforth PDC), e.g. Liisa pyysi Matti-a lähte-mä-än ‘Liisa asked Matti to leave’ (Liisa.NOM asked Matti-PART leave-INF-ILLATIVE), in which the agent of the infinite construction functions as the object of the governing (finite) construction. The PDC is divided into three subtypes. Type A includes verbs such as pyytää ‘to request, to ask (to do sth)’, which take a partitive object regardless of the outcome of the action (i.e. whether the action of requesting reaches the culmination point or not). Verbs used in type B, such as määrätä ‘to order (an order given by an institutional authority)’, take an accusative object despite the result of the action. Type C comprises verbs such as suostutella ‘to persuade’ taking either a partitive or an accusative object, depending on the outcome of the semiotic causation expressed in the clause, i.e. whether persuasion leads to the action being asked or not. The object case marking in the three subtypes reflects the two-faceted nature of the construction: on the one hand, it is a construction used for projection (≈ reported speech and thought); on the other, it is a causative construction. It seems that boundedness – as it has traditionally been defined in Finnish linguistics – does not suffice to describe the alternation of the object case in the PDC.

The talk is partly based on Lauranto (2017).

Goldin-Meadow et al. (2008) have established, in a pioneering study, that when people communicate via improvided gestures, they produce a S(ubject)-O(bject)-V(erb) order regardless of their first language. Could this be the ‚cognitively basic‘ or ‚natural‘ word order? The authors suggest it is. However, a number of studies have followed up and identified factors which make participants gesture an SVO order. I focus on those studies that claim that this factor lies in lexical semantics, namely in the verb’s meaning. We focus on verbs of creation, such as „bake a cake“ or „build a house“, and its role in emergent word order. There are two studies that make a claim about this kind of verbs: Schouwstra and de Swart (2014) claim that created objects follow the verb because they are intensional; and Christensen et al. (2016) claim that objects follow the verb because of „structural iconicity“, that is, the VO-structure is iconic of how the real event of creation happens.

We tested these claims with 32 participants by looking not only at created objects but also at created subjects, such as „a feather grew out“ or „a star appeared“. Our predictions were the following: a) if participants gesture a VO sequence because created objects are „intensional“, then created subjects should never be gestured after the verb (only a SV order should be found); b) if participants gesture VO sequences because of „structural iconicity“, then created subjects would be gestured as VS (see preregistration). Our results confirm the latter, as created subjects were indeed gestured after the verb significantly more often than before the verb (SV).

Our results have the following implication. It has been argued by many that improvised gesturing is an important part of language evolution (see Tomasello 2008). Based on our study, the temporal ordering of event components plays a significant role in the linearization of key parts of the sentence (S, V, and O). If so, the word orders of the world’s languages must have been shaped by the ordering properties of events. This could, for example, explain why there are almost as many SVO languages as SOV languages (see WALS); the temporal order account also explains the relative rarity of the other four orders (VSO, VOS, OSV, OVS): since they do not reflect the temporal order of event components, they are unlikely to become the convention by which events are packaged into language.

Czech polar questions can be interrogative (VSO word order) or declarative (SVO word order). Negation in interrogative polar questions (Nekoupil si Petr nějakou knihu? ‚Didn’t Petr buy some book?‘) predominantly receives the so-called outer reading, which signals that the speaker thinks it possible that p (= the positive prejacent of the question) holds (Staňková & Šimík 2025 for Czech; building on Holmberg 2013, Repp 2013, Romero & Han 2004, a.o.).

This presentation argues that negation in Czech declarative (SVO) polar questions (Petr si nekoupil knihu? ‚Petr didn’t buy any book?‘) is ambiguous between three readings: outer, medial, and inner. These readings differ in their semantic and pragmatic properties and can be distinguished by using several diagnostics: (i) scope relations with positive polarity items, negative polarity items and negative concord items, (ii) interaction with focus, and (iii) compatibility with certain particles (náhodou ‚by any chance‘, ještě ‚yet‘, fakt/opravdu ‚really‘). Formally, I propose that the three readings correspond to distinct positions at Logical Form.

The presentation introduces these diagnostics, outlines a formal analysis of the three negation readings, and reports results from a naturalness judgment experiment in which 71 Czech native speakers rated 88 polar questions in short contexts (audio mode) on a 7-point Likert scale. The results of the experiment support the view that Czech speakers systematically distinguish the three negation readings in declarative polar questions.

The lecture explores the Czech verb jít (‘to go’) as a grammatical unit whose distribution and function in contemporary Czech extend well beyond the domain of lexical motion. Although traditionally classified as a full lexical verb denoting physical movement, jít recurrently occurs in constructions in which it contributes little or no motion meaning and instead functions as part of a complex predicate. In such contexts, it occupies a structural position otherwise associated with lexical auxiliary verbs, most notably those expressing modality and phase.

The analysis is grounded in a principled distinction between the prototypical motion use of jít and its non-prototypical uses in constructions of the type jít + infinitive. In these constructions, the semantic contribution of jít is substantially weakened, while the infinitival verb carries the core lexical content of the predication. From a functional perspective, the construction is best analysed as a single predicational unit in which jít encodes abstract grammatical meaning rather than concrete motion. This shift is accompanied by semantic bleaching and increasing syntactic integration, both of which are widely recognised as central diagnostics of grammaticalization.

In its non-prototypical uses, jít systematically approximates the functions of modal and phase verbs. It may express feasibility, possibility, or constraint, as well as the onset of an event, most commonly with an ingressive interpretation. These values can be empirically motivated through substitution tests with canonical modal or phase predicates (such as ‚can‘, ‚be possible‘, or ‚begin‘), which yield paraphrases preserving the propositional content of the original utterance.

The empirical basis of the lecture consists of corpus-based analyses of representative written Czech, with particular attention paid to journalistic texts. This choice is methodologically significant, as journalistic discourse is generally regarded as norm-oriented and stylistically unmarked. The presence of grammaticalized uses of jít in this domain, therefore, challenges the widespread assumption that such constructions are confined to colloquial or non-standard varieties of the language.

The lecture further engages critically with existing grammatical and lexicographic descriptions, which tend to marginalise non-motion uses of jít, treating them as metaphorical extensions, idiomatic expressions, or stylistically marked phenomena. Based on formal, semantic, and distributional evidence, it is argued that jít in these constructions satisfies the core criteria of a lexical auxiliary. Its systematic exclusion from auxiliary-verb inventories thus appears to reflect conservative categorial traditions rather than the empirical organisation of contemporary Czech.

The contribution proposes a system-oriented account of jít as a verb situated along a grammaticalization continuum between lexical motion and grammatical function. More broadly, the lecture contributes to current discussions of analytic predicates and the classification of verbs at the lexicon–grammar interface, with implications extending beyond Czech to typological and cross-linguistic research.

The lecture is based on the published research:

PETROVIČOVÁ, Šárka; ŠKODOVÁ, Svatava. 2024. Analýza užití slovesa jít s oporou Českého národního korpusu. KGA 30, s. 44-64. https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1287079

ŠKODOVÁ, Svatava. 2022. Pseudo-Coordination of the verb jít (‘go’) in contemporary Czech. In Vincenzo Nicolò Di Caro, Giuliana Giusti and Daniel Ross (eds) Pseudo-Coordination and Multiple Agreement Constructions. Linguistik Aktuell / Linguistics today Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 192–211, https://doi.org/10.1075/la.274.08sko

ŠKODOVÁ, Svatava. 2020. The verb jít as a representative of a motion event in space in texts by non- native speakers of Czech, SALi 11 (2), s. 88–111 ISSN 2336-6702

ŠKODOVÁ, Svatava. 2020. Kdo všechno může v češtině jít. NČDS 12 (2), s. 59–62. ISSN 1805-367X

ŠKODOVÁ, Svatava (2017) Sloveso JÍT ve funkci složky analytického predikátu. Uličný, O. (ed.) Struktura v jazyce, jazyk v komunikaci. 1. vyd. Liberec: Technická univerzita v Liberci, 2017. 216 s. ISBN 978-80-7494-365-2 (str. 41–51) financováno Progres 4

When an adnominal possessor is coreferential with the subject of a clause, the Czech reflexive possessive pronoun svůj is typically used. However, personal pronouns may and do also occur in such contexts. I will present an analysis that follows up on Perevozchikova‚s systematic quantitative study of the phenomenon. A sample of more than 2000 occurrences (1SG and 2SG) from a corpus of social media posts was annotated for several structural and semantic variables in order to assess which contexts favour the use of either variant. I will show that speakers tend to use the personal pronouns in contexts where ambiguity regarding possessor identity may arise, even if not licensed by the syntactic context.

Verbal forms in the two branches of Afroasiatic have a common verbal form that in structure corresponds with a nominal base and pronominal enclitics. However, other forms of the verbal system differ in both branches. The structural difference is visible on Egyptian starting with Late Egyptian and consolidating in Coptic. This type of development goes in a rather different direction than the forms in the Semitic language. This process is visible when the forms are morphotactically divided and the functions assigned to particular positions are compared. The structural development in both languages shows differing strategies.

Human language differs from animal communication systems in its “…almost infinitely larger power of associating together the most diversified sounds and ideas” (C.Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871). An old tradition, going back at least to Galileo and Descartes, and developed in detail by generative grammar, identifies the key property of this power in the combinatorial system, recursive syntax.

The basic building block of syntax may be extremely simple (Merge), if the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995) is on the right track. Nevertheless, the generated structures are complex objects, as a consequence of recursion and of the rich and diversified lexical specifications that the system must satisfy. The cartography of syntactic structures (Cinque & Rizzi 2010, Rizzi to appear, Wolfe, ed. to appear) is a research program which focuses on capturing the complexity of structural representations, while at the same time trying to reconcile it with the simplicity of the underlying mechanisms.

The complexity of syntactic structures raises questions for language acquisition: how and when are complex syntactic configurations acquired by the child? A traditional assumption is that children “start small”, with very simple sentences, which get progressively more complex with development (e.g., Radford 1990). But what defines “simple” and “complex” exactly? In Friedmann, Belletti, Rizzi (2021) we have addressed these issues by fully exploiting rich cartographic representations. The “Growing Trees” approach puts forth the hypothesis that the acquisition of the syntactic tree proceeds in a bottom-up fashion: the child starts with the lower zones of the tree, and higher zones grow on top of lower zones till the completion of the cartographic tree. In this talk I would like to briefly illustrate the cartographic program, and focus on cross-linguistic analyses based in the Growing Trees idea (Belletti, Rizzi, Friedmann to appear).

References

Belletti, A., L. Rizzi, N. Friedmann (to appear) . Growing trees in child grammars: Cartography as an analytic tool for syntactic development. In Wolfe, ed., (to appear)

Chomsky, N. (1995) The Minimalist Program. MIT Press, Cambridge.MA.

Cinque, G. & L. Rizzi (2010) G. Cinque, L. Rizzi, The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, edited by B. Heine and H. Narrog. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, 2010, pp. 51-65. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199544004.013.0003

Friedmann, N., A. Belletti, L. Rizzi (2021) Growing trees: The acquisition of the left periphery. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 6(1): 131. 1–38. https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5877

Radford, A. (1990) Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax. Blackwell, Oxford.

Rizzi, L. (to appear) Description and Explanation in the Left Periphery: Some results, Problems, and Prospects. In Wolfe, ed., (to appear)

Wolfe, S., ed. (to appear) The Oxford Handbook of Syntactic Cartography. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

As a separate and internally coherent category quantifying or identifying in various ways members of pairs or dyads, dual determiners in Indo-European, or in general, have not been the subject of a specialized dedicated study so far. In the comparative and diachronic works on diverse Indo-European branches and languages, words like OCS oba ‘both’, Eng. neither, Gk. ἑκάτερος ‘each of the two’, or Ved. katará- ‘which of the two’ find their natural place within the respective sub-categories of pronouns and quantifiers as dual counterparts to plural and singular forms in languages where dual is a fully functional category, and dual agreement is a pervasive feature of morphosyntax. This category is remarkably rare cross-linguistically. Systems comparable to early Indo-European exist only in Japanese and Finnic, and the dual quantifier ‘both’ is (possibly) represented in about 8% in a sample of cca 400. This survey will largely concentrate on the non-Indo-European area with Indo-European serving as a typological framework.

The talk will explore the relationship between lexicalization patterns in manner- vs. path languages (also called S- vs. V- languages; Talmy 1991) and different conceptualization patterns of speakers, as researched in psycholinguistic experiments and primarily framed within the Thinking for Speaking Hypothesis (Slobin 1990). The general hypothesis is that the element of goal-oriented motion that is gramatically/lexically more salient (typically coded in the main-verb root and obligatory, cf. Czech motýl vlétl do pokoje vs. French un papillon est entré dans la pièce) is also more cognitively salient for speakers in other linguistic and possibly non-linguistic tasks. This has been tested and mostly confirmed using different experimental methods such as similarity judgment (e.g., Park 2020, Ji and Hohenstein 2018, Lai et al. 2014), eye-tracking (Papafragou et al. 2008) similarity-based arrangement (Montero-Melis and Bylund 2017) and supervised learning (Kersten et al. 2010).

I will introduce my own ongoing project, which focuses on motion-event conceptualizations of Czech-French interpreters as compared to other bilinguals and Czech and French monolinguals in an experimental task of similarity judgment and extension of novel verbs.

TBA