Amy
Rose Deal
Graduate Student
Amy Rose has investigated
'weak' objects in the so-called antipassive construction in Nez
Perce, an endangered Penutian language. This research involved
both work from grammars and corpora and a field trip to obtain
more nuanced semantic data in July 2006. Similarities between
antipassive constructions and the Russian Genitive of Negation
have been argued for by Bittner (p.c. to P.I.), whose work on
antipassives in Greenlandic Eskimo was discussed in a Fall 2005
project meeting at UMass.
Liane Jeschull
Graduate Student: Ph.D. candidate, University of Leipzig, Visiting
Scholar, UMass Amherst
Liane worked in the project in 2005 and has done research on the
relationship between the Russian Genitive of Negation
construction and the semantics of verbal aspect in transitive
predicates.
Galina Lastovkina
Undergraduate Student
In the Fall semester of 2004, Galina
Lastovkina helped the PI and co-PI with some exploratory corpus
searches of several Russian corpora, studying the alternation of
Genitive and Nominative and of Genitive and Accusative with
various classes of verbs and with variation of several other
relevant parameters.
Keir Moulton
Graduate Student
Among other things, Keir has helped the PI and co-PI to investigate the hypothesis that the Genitive of Negation
construction involves a 'weakening' of the semantics of the
Genitive-marked NP, in comparison to corresponding Nominative
and Accusative-marked NPs, by searching for work on analogous
phenomena in other languages. Part of his time was also spent on his
own related research on the semantics of intensional-object
constructions. He also works on inherently reflexive verbs.
Aynat
Rubinstein
Graduate Student
Aynat carried out related
research of her own within the project, namely on lexical and compositional aspects of the semantics
of reciprocal verbs. At the heart of this project lies the
alternation that relates non-reciprocal transitive verbs to two
reciprocal constructions in Russian, English, and other
languages. She is currently investigating the properties of
comitative phrases in reciprocal constructions, and testing
their relationship to the event semantics of high applicatives (Pylkkänen
2002).
Florian Schwarz
Graduate Student
Florian has carried out an in-depth investigation of intensional
transitive verbs, which may directly relate to the Genitive of
Negation construction, as proposed by Neidle and most recently
in Olga Kagan's work. One central result of this work is that
two types of intensional transitive verbs need to be
distinguished (the 'look-for' class vs. the 'need' class), which
differ with respect to both the syntactic make-up of their
complement as well the semantic type.
Anna Verbuk
Graduate Student
Anna, who worked for the project in 2005 and 2006, has done
research on the acquisition of the semantics of Russian ili 'or'
in contexts where clause-mate negation is present. She also has helped
the principal investigators with the Russian data, and spent 13
days in Moscow during Spring semester 2005, where she presented
a paper in a grant-related workshop and consulted with Russian
linguists and native speakers on several topics in Russian
syntax and semantics.
Youri Zabbal
Graduate Student
Website Designer/Administrator
One large contribution to the project from Youri was to develop
this website . Apart from that, he has done related research of
his own on the semantics of proper
names when they are coerced into 'weak' readings in various
constructions in various languages, something which seems to
happen in the Genitive of Negation construction, where it
constitutes an unsolved problem for most theories of the semantics
of Genitive of Negation.