The Slavic languages are fusional. Categories include person, gender, number, tense, aspect, and mood. We concentrate on endings for non-past, compound tenses, aorist, imperfect, and imperative, starting from Proto-Slavic (PSL), with reference to Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The time lapse between PIE and PSL is vast, so details are largely unrecoverable. The situation in the modern Slavic languages is sketched, summarizing secondary and primary endings, roots, themes, and thematic and athematic formations. The PIE present, aorist, and optative are outlined. Morphological persistence, innovation, and loss are evident from the data, and analogy plays an important and expected role. Attention is drawn to uncertainties in the origins of the various endings, uncertainties which on the whole have been pointed out, though much is open to research and discussion. Overall, the general state of the art in the field is well-established, but there is scope for further investigation, as becomes even clearer once viewed alongside other chapters.

This chapter discusses null-subject clauses, those that do not have the subject in the nominative case. Viewing Slavic languages in their totality, there is a range of null subjects from grammatically obligatory to optional (the presence of the subject signifies emphasis or juxtaposition) to pragmatically motivated. If we view the pro-drop feature as a continuum, as suggested by Pešková, from pro-drop in West Slavic and South Slavic to partially pro-drop in East Slavic (more so in Ukrainian, less so in Russian), then we could correlate a construction of the type (i) Uk. Hru-ACC zakinčeno-ppl ‘Game over (finished)’ with the pro-drop languages, and a construction of the type (d) Rus.-Uk. Udarilo-pastNEU gromom-INSTR ‘Hit by lightning (thunder)’ with partially pro-drop languages. In addition, Russian has a propensity to form infinitive constructions that are absent in other languages.

This chapter provides an overview of the inventory, formation, and use of synthetic and periphrastic tense and mood forms in modern Belarusian, Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian, Bulgarian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, Lower and Upper Sorbian, and Ukrainian. It addresses both characteristics common to all modern languages and features of individual languages.

The skeletal structure of a sentence is defined by the propositional acts of reference, predication, and modification. Reference is carried out by a referring phrase. The prototypical head of a referring phrase denotes an object; this is a noun. Modifiers are dependents of a noun that form attributive phrases. The prototypical head of an attributive phrase denotes a property; this is an adjective. A clause predicates something of a referent or referents. The prototypical head of a clause denotes an action; this is a verb. Reference, modification, and predication of nonprototypical concepts is possible, and often expressed by distinct constructions. Three principles govern how combinations of information packaging and semantic content are expressed: any concept can be packaged in any way; some ways are more ‘natural’ than others; and how they are packaged is constrained by conventions of the speech community. Nonprototypical constructions often share properties of ‘neighboring’ prototypical constructions. They often differ by having additional forms coding the nonprototypical function, and/or by a lesser potential for expressing associated grammatical categories (e.g., inflections).

Verbs combine with other words to form verb phrases (VP), which are the heads of most clauses. A typical clause is a subject and a head VP. English verbs typically have more variety in their forms than other English words, reflecting grammatical categories like tense, person, and number, though these forms can sometimes look and sound the same. Most also have the secondary forms, namely gerund-participle, past participle, and plain form. A special group of verbs with distinctive properties is the auxiliary verbs, including the modal auxiliaries.

Semantically speaking, situations such as actions and states have perfective and imperfective interpretations, which are expressed in clauses and depend largely on the head verb, along with its tense and aspect. English has two past tenses (preterite & perfect), one present tense, and no future tense. The preterite and present are the primary tenses. There are two aspects, progressive and non-progressive. The modal auxiliaries specialize in expressing modality, which relates to how the possible situations described in a clause can reflect reality. There’s also a special irrealis form of be for expressing counterfactuals.

There is an ongoing debate about the analysis of argument structure in a usage-based construction grammar. Some scholars have argued that argument structure is licensed by fully abstract schemas, but other researchers have claimed that argument structure is primarily determined by particular verbs. Chapter 7 argues that this controversy is easily resolved if we analyze argument structure in the framework of a network model in which verbs and constructions are interconnected by probabilistic links. For instance, the two constructions of the dative alternation occur with an overlapping set of verbs that are statistically biased to be used in one or the other constructions. The statistical biases can be analyzed as filler-slot associations that are shaped by two factors: (1) general conceptual processes of event semantics and (2) speakers’ experience with particular verbs and constructions. The analysis is supported by evidence from research on sentence processing and the extension of argument schemas to novel verbs in L1 acquisition and language change.

Chapter 8 extends the network analysis of argument structure to the analysis of parts of speech. Traditionally, parts of speech are analyzed as classes of lexical items with the same or similar structural properties, but the structural criteria that are used to define the major parts of speech (e.g., the occurrence of certain function words or inflectional affixes) can also be seen as properties of particular slots of constructional schemas. Crucially, while the slots of word class schemas are commonly defined by distributional criteria, they are not merely structural concepts but evoke particular conceptualizations. Combining research from cognitive linguistics with research from typology, the chapter argues that the major parts of speech are best analyzed in the framework of a network model in which particular lexical items are linked to particular word class schemas. The bulk of the analysis is concerned with the three major parts of speech (i.e., nouns, verbs, adjectives), but the chapter also includes a section on grammaticalization that explains how grammatical function words are derived from content words (and demonstratives) in a dynamic network model.