Browsing by Author "Mezhevich, Ilana"

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    Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 23, Spring 2001
    (University of Calgary, 2001-05) Dobrovolsky, Michael; Mezhevich, Ilana; Sheedy, Cory; Thormoset, David; Thrift, Erica
    The editors of this volume, Cory Sheedy, Ilana Mezhevich, Erica Thrift, David Thormoset, and Michael Dobrovolsky are pleased to present the twenty-third issue of the Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics published by the department of linguistics at the University of Calgary. The papers contained in this volume represent works in progress and as such should not be considered in any way final or definitive.
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    Featuring Russian tense: a feature-theoretic account of the Russian tense system
    (2006) Mezhevich, Ilana; Ritter, D. Elizabeth
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    Locative insertion, definiteness, and free word order in Russian
    (University of Calgary, 2001-05) Mezhevich, Ilana
    In this paper, I examine Russian data in terms of definiteness versus indefiniteness and locative inversion. The latter is investigated in Bresnan (1994). She presents an analysis of locative inversion in English and Chichewa and discusses the restrictions on locative inversion in these languages. In particular, she shows that, in English, locative inversion is permitted with many intransitive verbs and passivized transitive verbs (taking into account the by-phrase restriction), but is disallowed with transitive verbs. This generalization applies to Russian verbs as well. The notion of definiteness, however, requires clarification. As a starting point I adopt the definition proposed by Kramsky (1972:30): "By the term "determinedness" we understand the fact that nouns are classified according to whether the content expressed by the noun is clear and identifiable in a concrete way or not". This definition is vague and, therefore not very helpful. In the course of this paper, I will attempt to achieve a more precise formulation of definiteness.
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    Resultatives, particles, prefixes and argument structure
    (University of Calgary, 2002-09) Mezhevich, Ilana
    In this paper, I discuss the argument status of postverbal DPs in English resultative constructions, English verb-particle constructions and Russian prefixed verbs. I argue that postverbal DPs in English resultative constructions on the one hand and verb-particle constructions and Russian prefixed verbs on the other hand have different argument status. As shown by various studies, English resultatives are syntactically derived constructions (Carrier and Randall 1992; Neeleman and Weerman 1993; Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995, among others), whereas Russian prefixed verbs are lexically derived (Townsend 1975; Brecht 1985, Zaliznjak and Shmelev 1997, among others). I assume that lexical derivation as opposed to syntactic derivation is less productive and may change a verb's meaning in an unpredictable way. As a result, Russian prefixed verbs and English verb-particle constructions often have different meaning from their base verbs and may have different arguments.