Forthcoming: Topics in the semantics of Slavic languages

Berit Gehrke (ed), Radek Šimík (ed)

Synopsis

Topics in the semantics of Slavic languages contains twelve chapters devoted to a particular topic in formal semantics, as well as an introductory chapter. The topic chapters all consists of two parts: an overview part and a new analytical contribution or case study. The volume fulfills a number of goals: (i) to summarize existing analyses and theories, (ii) to provide a representative bibliographic overview of the relevant literature, (iii) to demonstrate what Slavic data and theories built upon them have to offer to the general linguistic discourse, and (iv) to provide a novel theoretical and/or empirical contribution. The chapters in this collection discuss data from the following Slavic languages: Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian (BCMS), and more specifically Croatian and Serbian, Bulgarian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Resian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Upper Sorbian, and Ukrainian.

The collection is of interest to a broad readership – Slavic as well as general linguistic scholars, experienced researchers as well as advanced undergraduate or postgraduate students. Individual contributions can serve as background reading to topical seminars. The volume covers areas of semantics in which Slavic languages have traditionally or more recently played an important role in the general formal semantic discourse (e.g. aspect, event structure, genericity, tense, information structure, negation and NPIs, (in)definiteness and specificity, bare NP semantics), as well as topics that have received less attention in their application to Slavic languages, but are pertinent to the theory of semantics, including its interfaces (e.g. focus participles, questions, imperatives, numerals, passives).

Chapters

  • The semantics of Slavic languages
    An introduction
    Berit Gehrke, Radek Šimík
  • Bare nominals and definiteness in Russian
    Olga Borik
  • Negative polarity items in Slavic
    Mojmír Dočekal
  • Genericity and habituality in Czech
    Hana Filip
  • Cross-Slavic aspect, passives, and temporal definiteness
    Berit Gehrke
  • Indefiniteness and specificity in Slavic languages
    Ljudmila Geist
  • Tense in Slavic
    Atle Grønn
  • The morphosemantics of Russian aspect
    Olav Mueller-Reichau
  • Polar question semantics and bias: Lessons from Slavic/Czech
    Radek Šimík
  • Lessons from Slovenian imperatives
    Adrian Stegovec
  • Event structure and derivational morphology
    A few reflections on the system of Russian
    Sergei Tatevosov
  • Family of exclusives in Polish
    Barbara Tomaszewicz-Özakın
  • Numerals and their kin
    The view from Slavic
    Marcin Wągiel
book cover

Published

December 10, 2025
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Open Slavic Linguistics

Online ISSN

2627-8332

Print ISSN

2627-8324
Cite as
Gehrke, Berit & Šimík, Radek (eds.). Forthcoming. Topics in the semantics of Slavic languages. (Open Slavic Linguistics). Berlin: Language Science Press.
Copyright (c) 2025 Berit Gehrke; Olga Borik; Radek Šimík; Mojmír Dočekal, Hana Filip, Ljudmila Geist, Atle Grønn, Olav Mueller-Reichau, Adrian Stegovec, Sergei Tatevosov, Barbara Tomaszewicz-Özakın, Marcin Wągiel

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.