Slovenian Verbal Valency: Syntax, Semantics, and Use

Code: Z6-4616 

Sponsor: Slovenian Research Agency

Duration: 1. 10. 2022 – 30. 9. 2024

Head: dr. Jakob Lenardič

Project description

In comparison to the principles of phrasal syntax, lexical items are idiosyncratic in their distributional and semantic characteristics. Because of this, the leading generative approaches to the modelling of the mental lexicon employ the Lexicalist Hypothesis, which assumes that the lexicon is a subcomponent of grammar with combinatorial rules for word formation and the manipulation of lexical meaning that are separate from those that govern morphosyntactic derivation and semantic composition.

As Slovenian is an inflectional language with a rich inventory of morphologically related words that unpredictably differ from one another in their selectional properties, the Lexicalist Hypothesis is assumed in the great majority of contemporary Slovenian linguistics. However, a major theoretical issue of this is that the subtle distinctions in syntagmatic processes between closely related words are explained away as the arbitrary characteristics of a highly complex lexical inventory, whereas they should be accounted for in a more systemic manner to ensure a parsimonious model of Slovenian grammar.

The postdoctoral project will develop a new account of the lexical-syntactic interface in Slovenian using an approach to word formation that takes place exclusively as part of the syntactic-semantic computation. Such a purely derivational approach to the modelling of the syntax and semantics of Slovenian verbs will accurately account for the complexities of actual usage. Beyond linguistics, the project will contribute to the greater understanding of the cognitive processes that underlie the syntactic and semantic computation of Slovenian argument structure, which lies at the very core of Slovenian grammar.

Objectives

1. The project will investigate the intralinguistic semantic properties of Slovenian impersonal constructions as well as cross-linguistic differences between Slovenian and other Slavic impersonal constructions, on the basis of which it will determine to what extent differences in the interpretation of thematic structure correspond to differences in syntactic complexity

2. The project will examine how constraints on the syntactic realisation of thematic structure interact with two of the most integral processes governing syntactic derivation – case assignment and agreement in φ-features – that is, agreement in person, gender, and number.

3. The project will examine the interaction between the lexical aspect and thematic structure of impersonal constructions in a wholly compositional syntactic framework, on the basis of which it will propose a novel formal account of the long-standing lexical puzzle as to why impersonal constructions only admit unergative verbs not unaccusative ones.

Empirically, the investigation will employ a mixed methods approach combining a large-scale corpus investigation with carefully controlled acceptability judgement tasks performed on the corpus data. A general assumption regarding empiricism in generative linguistics is that corpus data are too messy for the study of rarely occurring constructions, which are otherwise crucial for the advancement of syntactic theory. By contrast, the project will show that language corpora are actually invaluable sources of infrequent language information, and that it is precisely corpus data that shed new light on very fine-grained characteristics of the aspectual system and lexical argument structure in Slovenian, and how the two systems interact compositionally.