Annotation. ContentsThe Editors: Preface List of Publications by Frederik Kortlandt Willem ADELAAR: Towards a Typological Profile of the Andean Languages Elisabeth DE BOER: The Origin of Alternations in Initial Pitch in ihe Verbal Paradigms of the Central Japanese (Kyôto Type) Accent SystemsV. A. CHIRIKBA: Armenians and their Dialects in AbkhaziaKatia CHIRKOVA: On the Position of Báimã within Tibetan: A Look from Basic VocabularyKaren STEFFEN CHUNG: Living (Happily) with Contradiction George van DRIEM: The Language Organism: Parasite or Mutualist?Roger FINCH: Mongolian /-gar/ and Japanese /-gar-/Stefan GEORG: Yeniseic Languages and the Siberian Linguistic AreaEkaterina GRUZDEVA: How to Orient Oneself on Sakhalin: A Guide to Nivkh Locational TermsC. HOEDE: Knowledge Graph Analysis of Particles in JapaneseHenning KLÖTER: Facts and Fantasy about Favorlang: Early European Encounters with Taiwan¿s LanguagesMaarten KOSSMANN: Three Irregular Berber Verbs: Èat¿, D̀rink¿, B̀e Cooked, Ripen¿Riikka LÄNSISALMI: Teaching Personal Reference in JapaneseElena MASLOVA: Dual Nominalisation in Yukaghir: Structural Ambiguity as Semantic DualityRoy Andrew MILLER: The Altaic Aorist in *-Ra in Old KoreanMarc Hideo MIYAKE: Avoiding Abba: Old Chinese Syllabic HarmonyMaarten MOUS: Voice in Tunen: The So-Called Passive Prefix Bé-Irina NIKOLAEVA: Chuvan and Omok Languages?Martine ROBBEETS: If Japanese is Altaic, How can it be so Simple?Elena SKRIBNIK: Buryat Evaluative ConstructionsHarry STROOMER: Three Tashelhiyt Berber Texts from the Arsène Roux ArchivesArie VERHAGEN: Syntax, Recursion, Productivity ¿ A Usage-Based Perspective on the Evolution of GrammarJeroen WIEDENHOF: Language, Brains and the Syntactic Revolution.

This volume represents an overview of current research on Slavic linguistics in Europe and North America based on selected papers presented during the 6th Annual Meeting of the Slavic Linguistics Society (September 1-3, 2011, Aix-en-Provence, France). It includes topics across a range of linguistic fields (morphosyntax, syntax, and semantics) and discussions on specific aspects of Slavic languages within a typological perspective. All the papers illustrate a range of approaches, and each paper presents rigorous analysis of a set of Slavic data within the context of various models and aspects of language. While the main focus of the collection is impersonal constructions in Slavic languages, the book also includes morphological topics, such as reflexives, antipassive and evidential markers, syntactical relations with zero sign, auxiliary verbs and subordinate clauses, and semantics of nouns, adverbs and adjectives. The volume will be of interest to all scholars studying Slavic languages as well as those interested in general linguistics and linguistic typology.

"This volume contains contributions related to the accentology of the Baltic and Slavic languages by leading scholars in the field. [...] The volume further contains contributions on similar accentual systems and developments in other languages, such as Abkhaz and the Mordvinian languages. A number of papers also deal with the role of the Balto-Slavic accents in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European."--Back cover.

This study is devoted to a corpus of Old Russian letters, written on pieces of birchbark. These unique texts from Novgorod and surroundings give us an exceptional impression of everyday life in medieval Russian society. In this study, the birchbark letters are addressed from a pragmatic angle. Linguistic parameters are identified that shed light on the degree to which literacy had gained ground in communicative processes. It is demonstrated that the birchbark letters occupy an intermediate position between orality and literacy. On the one hand, oral habits of communication persisted, as reflected in how the birchbark letters are phrased; on the other hand, literate modes of expression emerged, as seen in the development of normative conventions and literate formulae.

The larger part of the present volume is about Slavic historical linguistics while the second part is about more general issues and methodological aspects. The initial chapters contain a revision of the author’s Slavic Accentuation and a discussion of the Slovene evidence for the Late Proto-Slavic accentual system and of the Kiev Leaflets. These are complemented by an extensive review of Garde’s theory and an introductory article about the work of earlier authors for those who are unfamiliar with the subject. Then follows a discussion of changes in the vowel system, Bulgarian developments, final syllables in Slavic, early changes in the consonant system, and of Halle and Kiparsky’s review of Garde’s book. This results in a relative chronology of 70 stages from Proto-Indo-European to Slavic. The following chapters deal with the progressive palatalization, the accentuation of West and South Slavic languages, various aspects of the Old Slovene manuscripts, the chronology of nominal paradigms, and other issues under discussion in recent publications. The second part of the present volume contains a number of case studies exemplifying specific theoretical problems, most of them of a semantic nature. The synchronic studies deal with Russian and Japanese syntax and semantics, the diachronic studies with tonogenesis in different languages and with semantic reconstruction in Altaic and Chinese.