-----Original Message-----
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Olga Steriopolo
Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2008 6:25 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SEELANGS] New dissertation on Russian Expressive Morphology
Dear all,
This is to advertise a new Ph.D. dissertation "Form and Function of
Expressive Morphology: A case study of Russian" by Olga Steriopolo. The full
text of the dissertation is available at http://hdl.handle.net/2429/424 and
http://www.steriopolo.com/. The abstract is copied below.
DISSERTATION ABSTRACT
In my Ph.D. dissertation, I conduct a detailed case study of expressive
suffixes in Russian. I show that although the suffixes under investigation
have the same function ("expressive"), they differ significantly in their
formal properties. I identify two major semantic types of expressive
suffixes: attitude and size suffixes. Attitude suffixes convey an attitude
of the speaker toward the referent. Size suffixes both convey an attitude
and refer to the size of the referent.
I argue that the two different semantic types map onto different syntactic
types. Attitude suffixes are syntactic heads, while size suffixes are
syntactic modifiers. As heads, attitude suffixes determine the formal
properties of the derived form. As modifiers, size suffixes do not determine
the formal properties of the derived form. Attitude suffixes can attach both
to category-free vRoots and to various categories (n/a/v), while size
suffixes can only attach to a noun category.
I investigate the functional and formal properties of Russian expressive
suffixes in a systematic way, which has not been done before. In doing so, I
analyze how expressive suffixes pattern along several kinds of criteria
(gender/class, category, subcategorization). An important byproduct of this
analysis is that I show how grammatical gender of an expressive form can be
predicted from its inflectional class (combined with animacy and natural
gender of the base).
One implication of this analysis is that I show that the formal properties
of expressives are no different from those of non-expressives
(descriptives), as both expressives and descriptives can attach as heads or
modifiers either to vRoots or categories. Another implication is that the
formal criteria which I develop for a small set of expressive suffixes in
Russian can be extended to set up a cross-linguistic typology of
expressives..............................................
Olga Steriopolo, Ph.D.
Department of Linguistics
University of British Columbia
Totem Field Studios
2613 West Mall
Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4 Canada
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