Peter Kosta (Universität Postdam): Animacy, Gender and Agreement in Typologically and Genetically Cognate and Non-Cognate Languages – Explorations into the Syntax-Semantic Interfaces of Human Language Faculty

The following project goes back to our research on grammatical categories with special reference to syntax and semantics of Slavic languages compared to a small set of typologically and genetically non-cognate languages usually referred to as indigenous languages. This kind of comparison aims at discovering overt and hidden properties of human mind encoded as grammatical categories in grammars of different types of languages ranging from Slavic Languages such as Russian and Czech or Polish which one can typologically compare roughly to the so-called inflected type of synthetic Indo-European languages and including Carrier and Ket (a Yeniseian language) which are typologically polysynthetic and partly agglutinative, with one Semitic language, namely Israeli (New Hebrew or Ivrid) and including a very different type of two polysynthethic languages, namely Barngarla and Kaurna in South-West of Australia. The theoretical part wants to present alternative formal approaches such as Cognitive Grammar (Langacker), Lexical Functional Grammar (Bresnan) and Radical Minimalism (Kosta & Krivochen 2013) in order to explore the grammar and semantic of Animacy and Gender.