Degree achievements from a Slavic perspective
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Advances in formal Slavic linguistics 2021 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | https://zenodo.org/records/10078020 |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10078020 |
| Keywords | degree achievements; evaluativity; prefix; Russian; Slavic; experimental evidence |
| Description | The evaluative behaviour of degree achievements (e.g., cool, widen, lengthen, dry) has been a puzzling problem for many linguists. The currently standard theory (Kennedy & Levin 2008) treats them as degree expressions based on different types of scales, which in turn influence the resulting evaluative or non-evaluative interpretation. While it may account for English, this theory faces empirical problems when confronted with cross-linguistic data. In this paper, we present an experiment on Russian exploring if verbal prefixes influence the (non-)evaluative interpretation of degree achievements. It follows from the results that prefixation is at least as important as the underlying scales for the cases we studied, which empirically challenges the scalar theory. |
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