The present contribution follows up on Rudnev (2011). It is for this reason that I omit most of the arguments for the pronominal nature of kendisi and
present a formalisation of its semantic properties based on Partee (1983) and Elbourne (2008).

This paper documents a number of restrictions on negation marking in Avar, a Northeast Caucasian language, and presents a tentative analysis of the observed morphosyntactic facts as having a semantic basis. The two different negation markers are analysed, based on the proposal in (Ramchand & Svenonius 2014), as taking complements of a different…[Read more]

This paper claims that the scope properties of the Russian disjunction marker ili correlate with the phrasal vs. clausal nature of the disjunction: phrasal disjunction yields narrow scope whilst clausal disjunction yields wide scope. In so doing, we introduce novel empirical generalisations that are problematic for purely semantic analyses of…[Read more]

This paper discusses two morphologically related anaphoric pronouns in Avar (Avar-Andic, Nakh-Daghestanian) and proposes that one of them should be treated as a minimal pronoun that receives its interpretation from a λ-operator situated on a phasal head whereas the other is a logophoric pronoun denoting the author of the reported event.

The present doctoral thesis examines the syntax and semantics of a number of constructions encoding operator-variable dependencies in Avar, a Northeast Caucasian language predominantly spoken in the Republic of Daghestan in the Russian Federation. In doing so it touches upon such empirical domains as reflexivity and anaphoricity, argument…[Read more]

This paper considers the origin of ‘pitch accents’ in Scottish Gaelic with a view to evaluating the hypothesis that this feature was borrowed from North Germanic varieties spoken by Norse settlers in medieval Scotland. It is shown that the ‘pitch accent’ system in Gaelic is tightly bound with metrical structure (more precisely syllable count),…[Read more]

A typological overview of initial consonant mutations

The origin of North Germanic tonal accents is a question with a long history and a range of available answers. Although the basic facts are not in dispute, the accents’ historical development remains controversial. In this paper, I aim to contribute an argument in favour of the view that tonal accent arose in post-Viking Age North Germanic in c…[Read more]

This paper presents a phonological analysis of a glottalization phenomenon in dialects of Danish known as ‘short-vowel stød’. It is argued that both short-vowel stød and common Danish stød involve the attachment of a laryngeal feature to a prosodic node—specifically the mora. In the case of short-vowel stød that mora lacks segmental content,…[Read more]

In this paper I propose an analysis of the repairs of sonority sequencing violations in South Welsh in terms of a non-phonological process of stem allomorphy. As documented by Hannahs (2009), modern Welsh uses a variety of strategies to avoid word-final rising-sonority consonant clusters, depending in part on the number of syllables in the word.…[Read more]

‘Phonologization’ is a process whereby a phonetic phenomenon enters the phonological grammar and becomes conceptualized as the result of categorical manipulation of phonological symbols. I analyse the phonologization of a predictable phonological pattern in Welsh, with particular attention to identifying criteria for whether phonologization has…[Read more]

This review essay focuses on the new monograph by S. A. Smith Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017). As a leading expert in the social history of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Smith provides a comprehensive political, social, and cultural narrative of one of the central events in the…[Read more]

Three major factions in the Russian Civil War in the Far East engaged in nationalist mobilization coming up with different rhetorical tropes and images in the 1920-1922 period. The ultra-royalist faction led by Mikhail Konstantinovich Diterikhs, which in 1922 controlled the Provisional Priamur Government in Vladivostok, portrayed the Romanovs as…[Read more]