• A
  • A
  • A
  • ABC
  • ABC
  • ABC
  • А
  • А
  • А
  • А
  • А
Regular version of the site

Lexical restrictions on grammatical processes: in search of explanation

(based on the data of transitivity alternations and typology of complex clauses)

Course author

Alexander Letuchiy

Associate Professor, School of Linguistics, HSE 

Course materials

 Lexical restrictions on grammatical processes: in search of explanation - presentation

 

Course annotation 

Grammar is often considered to be a domain of generalized productive operations: grammatical operations and strategies are often possible for large classes of words, clauses or other units. However, in the world’s languages there are cases when a small class of units behaves differently from the majority of language elements. I will show that these cases are complicated in that they can be accounted for in different terms:

  • purely lexical (the specific behaviour is fixed in the dictionary and has nothing to do with the grammatical system)
  • historical (the specific behaviour results from a historical scenario which is not always visible in the synchronic situation)
  • semantic (the specific behaviour is characteristic of items with a particular meaning)
  • morphological (the specific behaviour reflects some special morphological features of the items under analysis)

The course will consist of some case studies in verbal valency / transitivity change and complex clause formation which will help us get closer to a general theoretical perspective.

For instance, in some languages there are small classes of labile (ambitransitive) verbs, though in general transitivity is morphologically marked. Should we just remember these labile verbs or, perhaps, we can explain their lability by some specific features of the situation? Another example: a small class of verbs can employ a specific strategy of complementation or adverbial subordination. Is it explicable by their semantic and syntactic properties, or the rare strategy is just inherited from the previous state of the grammatical system?