Slavic Linguistics Colloquium

Thursdays, 4:15-5:45 (CET)
(zoom or hybrid)

If you want to be added to the mailing list, present something, or want to suggest a presenter, please contact berit.gehrke AT hu-berlin.de

Upcoming talks

December 4, 2025, 16:15-17:45 [zoom]
Predrag Kovačević (Novi Sad), Joeri Vinke (Graz), Petra Mišmaš (Nova Gorica) & Marko Simonović (Graz): Nominalisatie and nominalizacija walk into a pub, where nominalisering and nominaliziranje are already sitting: Latinate nominalisations in Germanic and Slavic

Abstract

December 11, 2025, 16:15-17:45 [zoom]
Alberto Frasson (Wrocław): Just a phi apart: The syntax of adjectival and adverbial participles in Polish and beyond

Polish active present participles exhibit a well-known contrast between agreeing (adjectival) and invariant (adverbial) forms. This talk argues that these two forms do not reflect distinct categorial statuses, but instead follow from the internal functional structure of the participial phrase. I propose that all participles contain an aspectual head, but only agreeing participles contain an additional φ-head, which introduces agreement features and participates in case assignment: it agrees with the NP inside its domain and can also interact with higher clause-level probes. Because selection targets the features contributed by this head, verbs and prepositions do not c-select participles as adjectives or nouns, but as constituents bearing particular formal features. Non-agreeing participles simply lack the φ-head and therefore remain invariant. Drawing on additional evidence from Danish, Latvian and Latin, the analysis unifies the distributional patterns of Polish participles, accounts for their morphological variability, and eliminates the need for adjectival recategorization. Participles are thus treated as verbal phrases whose behavior reflects the availability of an extra φ-probe rather than category shifts.

January 15, 2026 [Berlin & zoom]

Iga Kościołek: How Impersonal Constructions Shape Narratives: The Dual Role of the Polish -no/-to Construction in Discourse

February 5, 2026 [zoom]
Natalia Meir (Bar-Ilan): TBD

February 2026 [zoom]
Eleanor Sand (Urbana-Champaign): Negative Concord in L2 Russian and English

This study examines second language (L2) acquisition of Negative Concord (NC) and Double Negation (DN). Recent experimental work has found native speakers of (Standard American) English – a DN language – to possess a latent Non-Strict NC grammar. Despite not producing such structures, native speakers are predisposed to interpret double negatives with negative objects as single negation (e.g., ‘He didn’t eat nothing’ = ‘He ate nothing’) and double negatives with negative subjects as double negation (e.g., ‘No one didn’t eat food’ = ‘Everyone ate food’) (Blanchette 2017; Blanchette & Lukyanenko 2019). Previous work has found first language (L1) transfer effects in L2 acquisition of Negative Concord Items, Polarity Items, and negation. However, no study has explored how a latent NC grammar may affect L2 acquisition of NC (Alexandrino 2010; Seaman et al. 2023; Yamada 2022). In addition, little is known about how a latent NC/DN grammar may be acquired by L2 learners. The present study addresses this gap by investigating L1 English L2 Russian acquisition of Strict NC as well as L1 Russian L2 English acquisition of DN. Data analysis is ongoing. The results promise to shed light on the bidirectional role a latent grammar plays in L2 acquisition.

March 5, 2026, 16:15-17:45 [zoom]
Tanya Ivanova Sullivan (UCLA) & Iliyana Krapova (Venice): Clitic constructions in monolingual and heritage Bulgarian

March 2026 [zoom]
Haneul Choi (Urbana-Champaign): Information Structure and Object Order in Russian Ditransitives: An Experimental Study

March/April 2026 [zoom]

Victoriya Trubnikova (Verona): TBD

Past talks

November 27, 2025: Martin Alldrick (Surrey): Morphological overabundance in Czech and Slovak nouns: a diachronic perspective

Overabundance, wherein two inflectional affixes can express the same functional meaning is a well attested phenomenon in both Czech and Slovak declension, yet its historic origins remain understudied. This talk charts the development of overabundance from the earliest stages of Czech and Slovak to the present day and shows how a diachronic analysis of the distribution of variant forms can be used to answer wider questions both about the grammatical structure of Czech and Slovak and wider morphological theory.

November 20, 2025: Dorota Klimek-Jankowska (Wrocław), Alberto Frasson (Wrocław), Justyna Gruszecka (Poznań), Antonina Mocniak (Cracow), Andrzej Żak (Polish Academy of Sciences), Elena Vaiksnoraite (OSU), Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan (UCLA), Daria Seres (Graz), Vladimir Cvetkoski (Skopje), Patrick Mihaylov (Sofia) & Diana Androva (Sofia): A Semantic Micro-Typology of the Present Perfect across Baltic and South Slavic Languages: Evidence from Translation Mining

The goal of this study is to account for the variation in the distribution and meaning of the present perfect in Baltic and South Slavic languages by applying the Translation Mining methodology (Wälchli and Cysouw 2012; van der Klis, Le Bruyn, and de Swart 2017, i.a.). To this end, we compare the original English version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone with its translations into Bulgarian, Croatian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, and Serbian, languages in which the perfect is not the only past tense form.We report quantitative findings showing that variation in the present perfect systems across South Slavic and Baltic is highly fine-grained. In our qualitative analysis of the corpus data, we zoom in on two key dimensions of variation, aoristic drift and evidential drift, to systematize the observed differences in the distribution of the present perfect in the investigated languages. On the formal side, our objective is to show that it is possible to use a shared semantic component of the present perfect, as proposed by Grønn and von Stechow (2020) and Pancheva and Zubizarreta (2023), and to correlate the reported variation patterns with systematic modes of composition of different ingredients of the core representation. We are particularly interested in auxiliary omission in evidential perfects in Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Latvian, and in their interaction with definite past-time modifiers.

October 30, 2025: Philip Shushurin (Higher School of Economics): The distribution of short form adjectivals in Russian: a novel generalization

The paper discusses the distribution of short and long adjectival forms in finite and non-finite clauses. A novel hypothesis is formulated according to which short form adjectivals possess two case forms – Nominative and Instrumental – and hence are not devoid of case, as standardly assumed. The paper shows that with this novel assumption the empirical description of the relevant phenomena can be significantly simplified, in particular, the long form passive participles can be described as completely disallowed in the predicative position. I also propose an analysis, according to which: (a) long and short forms are in complementary distribution depending on the attributiveness; (b) the case of an adjectival can be assigned by certain (lexical) verbal heads, as well as several non-finite heads (c) short forms can also be assigned Nominative by the closest T in the case it is finite.

October 23, 2025: Vesela Simeonova (Graz): Counterfactual marking on modals

This talk presents new insights, based on data from Bulgarian, on the interaction between counterfactual morphology and the interpretation of necessity and desire modals. The starting point is a puzzle presented by von Fintel & Iatridou (2008; 2023) that in some languages: (i) CF morphology ("X-marking") is used to turn a strong necessity modal into a weak necessity one, and want into wish; (ii) in addition, X-marked modals are ambiguous: the CF-marked modal claim can be evaluated in the actual world or in a CF world (endo vs exo readings). In this talk I show that Bulgarian has two morphologically distinct X-markers: weak CF (X') and strong CF (X''), thanks to which all readings identified by von Fintel & Iatridou (2023) are morphosemantically disambiguated. The pattern that emerges is that the choice between X' and X'' marking on modals correlates with CF strength in their interpretations. This informs the nature of the relationship between X-morphology and modals in new ways and relates to recent works that identify a richer morphological inventory for CF marking, e.g. in Portuguese (Ferreira, 2023), Japanese (Mizuno, 2024), Serbian (Kaufmannn & Todorovic, 2024), and Palestinian Arabic and Hebrew (Karawani, 2014).

October 16, 2025: Bożena Rozwadowska (Wrocław), Liudmyla Petryk (Częstochowa) & Natalia Shlikhutka (Wrocław): Psych Reflexive Alternation in Ukrainian and Russian

We investigate the EO/ES (Experiencer Object/Experiencer Subject) in Ukrainian and Russian. Building on Rozwadowska & Bondaruk (2019) and Bondaruk & Rozwadowska (2024) as well as on previous cross-linguistic research, we examine whether this alternation constitutes a subtype of the causative/anticausative alternation (CAA) or represents an independent phenomenon. At the background of comparative evidence from Greek, Romanian, Brazilian Portuguese, Serbian, and Polish, we explore the EO/ES alternation in Ukrainian and Russian and propose a three-way classification of psych verbs based on their morphosyntactic properties. We demonstrate that not all EO verbs are the same. The classes identified in our data differ systematically in terms of case marking, argument realization, as well as their compatibility with instrumental NPs and causative prepositional phrases. The analysis reveals that while some EO/ES alternations in Ukrainian and Russian share surface similarities with CAA, their syntactic behaviour and interpretation often diverge in crucial ways. Our findings support a fine-grained classification of alternating EO verbs with a general conclusion that the EO/ES alternation in these languages cannot be reduced to the causative alternation but rather should be treated as a complex distinct psych verb alternation with different faces.
information about talks before October 2025 can be found on the German webpage

co-organised by Daniele Artoni, Marco Biasio, Berit Gehrke, Jacopo Saturno, Jelena Živojinović

Information about past talks can be found here

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