Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Zimmerling, Anton

Titel

Microsyntax meets macrosyntax: Russian neg-words revisited

Ist Teil von

• Russian linguistics, 2024-12, Vol.48 (1), Article 6

Ort / Verlag

Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Quelle

SpringerNature Journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This paper offers a new analysis of Russian syntactic idioms consisting of stressed general negation n´e - fused with a wh -word ( k -word). The elements from this class take infinitival complements and select dative subjects. The clauses with Russian neg -words like mne negde spat’ ‘I have no space to sleep’ and their affirmative counterparts represent the modal existential construction conveying the meaning ‘ p is (not) available & X can (not) do q ’. I argue that while the perspective of checking Russian modal existentials on a class of embedded wh -infinitives is important, it must be complemented by a comparison of idioms of the mne negde spat’ type with two productive sentence patterns—dative-predicative and dative-infinitive structures. The former are control structures, where dative subjects are matrix clause elements, while the latter have raising properties. Syntactic idioms display mixed properties: on the one hand, they match the overt syntax of dative predicatives, on the other hand, show residual raising effects and license derived non-animate subjects. Like root dative-infinitive structures, syntactic idioms express the meaning of external (alethic) modality, but the same type of modality can be expressed by some dative predicatives. The clauses with neg -words originated as embedded dative-infinitive structures, a type marginally acceptable in Modern Russian, while the dative-predicative construction extends its coverage and assimilates neg -words. The neg -words are derived by the movement of k -words into the matrix clause. If a case-marked k -word raises to a non-argument position, it loses morphological case and the neg -word is reanalyzed as a predicative. If a case-marked k -word raises to the subject position, the neg -word inherits the case of the k -word, which is possible only for dative k -words komu and čemu .