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

Biographies

Berit Gehrke

Berit Gehrke is a staff member of the Department of Slavic and Hungarian Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She received her PhD in 2008 from Utrecht, with a dissertation on the semantics and syntax of prepositions and motion events. She specializes in theoretical semantics, and its interfaces with syntax and pragmatics. Her particular research interests include event semantics, event structure, event kinds, argument structure, adjectival passives, and adjectival and adverbial modification.

Radek Šimík

Radek Šimík is an assistant professor at the Institute of Czech Language and Theory of Communication at Charles University, Faculty of Arts. He specializes in theoretical and experimental syntax, semantics, and pragmatics and his particular research interests include questions, relative clauses, information structure, and nominal reference. He’s currently a co-investigator in the project Prosodic expression of utterance information structure in Czech (with Jan Volín; GA ČR) and the leader of the research module Language in adulthood in the large-scale project Language in Life (chief PI: Pavel Caha, MUNI; OP JAK Společenské a humanitní vědy).

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 11). 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.

Details about the available publication format: PDF

PDF

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-96110-589-2

Details about the available publication format: Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-98554-206-2

Physical Dimensions

180mm x 245mm