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Item Gary H. Toops In Memoriam(Slavica Publishers, 2014) Dickey, Stephen M.Item Russian давать + infinitive: 'to give', 'to let', or 'to have'?(American Council of Teachers of Russian, 1991) Toops, Gary H.This article examines a variety of sentence types, differing by virtue of the presence/absence of certain syntactic constituents (direct/indirect object) and the semantic properties of those constituents (animacy, physical transferability, etc.). The conclusion is that the verb давать has thus far undergone only partial grammaticalization towards being a causative auxiliary; that the incompleteness of the verb's grammaticalization as a causative auxiliary is due primarily to the homonymy, and hence ambiguity, of certain surface structures. It is finally proposed that давать be viewed as two distinct lexical items: 'to give' and 'to let' (the latter subcategorized for a number of syntactic and semantic constraints).Item Causativity in Bulgarian(Verlag Otto Sagner, 1984) Toops, Gary H.Author discusses the grammatical means of which Bulgarian disposes for the expression of causative relations as well as its similarity and differences with other Slavic languages.Item The morphosyntax of causative relations in Czech and Upper Sorbian: a contrastive, descriptive analysis(MODERN HUMANITIES RES ASSN, 2013-07) Toops, Gary H.The article provides a contrastive, descriptive analysis of the morphosyntax of causative relations in two closely related West Slavic languages — contemporary Czech and Upper Sorbian. Four types of causative constructions are identified: (a) contextual causatives, (b) causative ‘give’-constructions, (c) synsemantic causative constructions (incorporating the Czech causative auxiliaries nechávat/nechat and dávat/dát and the Upper Sorbian causative auxiliary dać), and (d) autosemantic causative constructions. It is concluded that Upper Sorbian shares with Czech only causative constructions (b), (c), and (d) and that the two languages differ most from each other in their instantiation of synsemantic causatives. The potential influence of German on causative expression in Czech and Upper Sorbian is considered alongside occasional comparisons with Russian. The analysis also incorporates data from colloquial varieties of Upper Sorbian and takes into account problems of ambiguity and obsolescence as well as the syntactic exponency of Direct Agents in certain Czech causative constructions.Item Book Review: The grammatical system of Upper Sorbian slang on language contact(American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, 2010) Toops, Gary H.