The phenomenon of Russian honorific agreement was first mentioned and used as evidence in Agreement Hierarchy by Greville Corbett (1979). Since then it has received little attention in the...Show moreThe phenomenon of Russian honorific agreement was first mentioned and used as evidence in Agreement Hierarchy by Greville Corbett (1979). Since then it has received little attention in the literature, unlike the other, more famous, cases of semantic agreement, e.g. hybrid nouns (Corbett 2015), pancake sentences (Enger 2004). This thesis is dedicated to investigating honorific agreement in Russian on the basis of independently collected data from the Russian National Corpus and a number of individually selected literary works.Show less
In this thesis, I will study formulaic language use by applying the linguistic model as applied to Jane Austen's own letters in Tieken-Boon van Ostade's (2014) In Search of Jane Austen: The...Show moreIn this thesis, I will study formulaic language use by applying the linguistic model as applied to Jane Austen's own letters in Tieken-Boon van Ostade's (2014) In Search of Jane Austen: The Language of the Letters, section '3.3. Letter-Writing Formulas' to Jane Austen's fictional letters as part of her novels. By looking at the opening and closing formulas in the 41 letters that are included in Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey (1818) and Persuasion (1818), I aim to determine the implications of the formulaic language use for the relationships. From this analysis, then, it will also become clear what differences and similarities there are between the language in Jane Austen’s own letters and her fictional letters as part of her novels.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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The current thesis discusses the topic of partial agreement between a coordinated subject and the agreeing verb in Russian. Previous accounts have pointed out the relevance of word order for the...Show moreThe current thesis discusses the topic of partial agreement between a coordinated subject and the agreeing verb in Russian. Previous accounts have pointed out the relevance of word order for the related agreement phenomena in languages like Arabic, Slovenian and Dutch. No proposal has gone beyond describing this factor, and offered an explanation for the role of word order. In this thesis, I present a formal analysis explaining the relevance of word order from the perspective of Information Structure considerations. I show that the structures facilitated by the discourse-related operations enable the establishment of additional agreement, namely agreement in definiteness. Definiteness-driven agreement affects the syntactic and semantic weight of the conjuncts, which poses consequences for the standard phi-feature agreement.Show less
