Gastvortrag von Prof. Johanna Nichols

Am Mittwoch, 25. April 2012 hat Prof. Johanna Nichols von der Universität of California Berkely zu dem Thema "The basic alignment of Slavic ditransitives" gesprochen.

Inhalt: Audry 1977 argues that (in modern terms) the basic alignment of ancestral Indic (and/or Indo-Iranian) ditransitives was goal-object ('load cart with hay'). In view of the close phylogenetic and areal relationship of Slavic to Indo- Iranian, is there any evidence of this in Slavic? I survey prefixation and basic verb alignment in a corpus-based study of modern Russian, similar evidence from elicitation and dictionary work for other Slavic languages, the evidence of morphological and lexical changes in East Slavic, and early Slavic derivational processes such as the formation of deverbal nouns and denominal verbs, and show that Slavic ditransitives are and have always been firmly theme-object ('load hay on cart'). What is distinctive about Slavic is the way that derivational prefixes (na-, za-, po-, ob-) interact with ditransitive alignment.