This book provides a detailed study and a novel Minimalist account of copular sentences in Russian, focusing on case marking alternations (nominative vs. instrumental) and drawing a distinction between two types of copular sentences.On the assumption that Merge is defined in the simplest way possible, it is argued that not all syntactic structures are a(nti)symmetrical. One of the copular sentence types is analyzed as a poster child for symmetrical structures, while the other type is treated as asymmetrical. The originality of this study lies in treating the copula in the two types of copular...

This text provides a detailed study and a novel minimalist account of copular sentences in Russian, focusing on case marking alternations (nominative vs. instrumental) and drawing a distinction between two types of copular sentences.

Over the past decade, a group of prolific and innovative evolutionary biologists has sought to reinvent historical linguistics through the use of phylogenetic and phylogeographical analysis, treating cognates like genes and conceptualizing the spread of languages in terms of the diffusion of viruses. Using these techniques, researchers claim to have located the origin of the Indo-European language family in Neolithic Anatolia, challenging the near-consensus view that it emerged in the grasslands north of the Black Sea thousands of years later. But despite its widespread celebration in the...

This book challenges media-celebrated evolutionary studies linking Indo-European languages to Neolithic Anatolia, instead defending traditional practices in historical linguistics.