Henning Andersen (2012) points out that the Russian “new Vocative” (e.g., мам! ‘mama!’, Саш! ‘Sasha!’) presents a series of unusual behaviors that set it apart from ordinary case marking. Andersen argues that the Vocative should not be considered a declensional word form of nouns. The Russian Vocative is certainly an uncommon linguistic category, but does this entail setting up a new tran- scategorial ...

In film history Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) is usually considered the first documentary and possibly one of the best known documentaries of the silent era. It has also been called the first ethnographic film, as well as the first art film. However, this paper will not discuss the question of whether Nanook is a documentary, rather it will focus on the fact that there is not only ...

<b>Purpose</b> – The purpose of this paper is to provide a discussion on whether more traditional documents like a film of the classical silent era can be discussed as an unbounded document. <b>Design/methodology/approach</b> – By taking Gérard Genette ’ s concept of the paratext as point of departure and focussing on the exhibition of Nanook of the North during the silent era, the ...

Nanosyntax is a novel approach to the architecture of language, designed to make (better) sense of the new empirical picture emerging from recent years of syntactic research. It is a large-scale project, addressing a wide array of issues, ranging from big issues such as the modularity of language, to fine details, such as the derivation of allomorphy in irregular patterns of given languages and its ...

We investigate the phonotactic behaviour of nasal consonants in a database of over 200 languages. Our findings challenge the common classification of nasals as intermediate between obstruents and liquids on the sonority hierarchy. Instead, we propose that there are two types of nasal consonants, one group with lower sonority than liquids and one with higher sonority. We propose that these two types ...

This article focuses on the portrayal of reindeer Sami in the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen's early book Lapland from 1907, a work that has received relatively little attention in Rasmussen scholarship. His characterizations of the Sami reflect conventional, paternalistic ideas of race and culture at the turn of the century as well as romantic-sentimental conceptions of indigenous peoples as noble ...

This article deals with the L2 acquisition of differences between Norwegian and English passives, and presents data to show that the acquisition of these differences by Norwegian L2 acquirers of English cannot be fully explained by positive evidence, cues, conservativism or economy. Rather, it is argued, it is natural to consider whether indirect negative evidence may facilitate acquisition by ...

This article contributes to Construction Grammar, historical linguistics, and Russian linguistics through an in-depth corpus study of predicate agreement in constructions with quantified subjects. Statistical analysis of approximately 39,000 corpus examples indicates that these constructions constitute a network of con- structions (“allostructions”) with various preferences for singular or plural ...