عنوان
پدید آورنده
موضوع
رده
کتابخانه
محل استقرار
TL57871
انگلیسی
Syntactic and Semantic Perspectives on First Conjunct Agreement in Russian
[Thesis]
Krejci, Bonnie
Gribanova, Vera
Stanford University
2020
324 p.
Ph.D.
Stanford University
2020
This dissertation is an investigation into the syntax and lexical semantics of the phenomenon of first conjunct agreement (FCA) as it occurs in Russian. An in-depth look at FCA sheds light on the structure of conjunction and its interaction with predicate-argument agreement, as well as on word order variation and argument realization. Because FCA occurs only in non-canonical word orders-when the apparently conjoined noun phrases are postverbal-it is necessary to determine how such orders arise in Russian. Word order variation has proved a perennial problem in the study of Slavic languages, going back to at least the Prague School in the 1930s. This dissertation investigates the derivational paths taken by nominative arguments in the Russian clause, presenting a novel account of subject-final word orders (VS, OVS, and others). The key to understanding such orders is that nominative marked subjects must occupy the specifier of TP, even when they are pronounced postverbally. While this kind of "covert movement" is well known within the domain of A'-movement, it is less often proposed within the domain of A-movement (Polinsky & Potsdam, 2013); the behavior of covertly moved arguments can help elucidate the roles of, and the relationship between, syntax and the phonological component. In the realm of lexical semantics, FCA in Russian comes to bear on the problem of variable unaccusative/unergative syntactic behavior, and, even more generally, the problem of argument realization. FCA in Russian has been characterized as occurring only when the verb is unaccusative or passive (Babyonyshev, 1996)-in other words, when the apparently conjoined noun phrases are introduced as first sisters to the verb. However, this generalization is not absolute; under specific circumstances, FCA can also be found in sentences in which the verb is typically considered unergative. This pattern is not limited to FCA but occurs with the genitive of negation construction in Russian as well, and it is paralleled across languages by other constructions that are said to be sensitive to unaccusativity. This dissertation presents a solution to the general problem of variable unaccusative/unergative behavior by proposing a model of the relationships among happenings in the real world, verb meaning, and syntactic representation. The model shows how a single verb root can come to be associated with either unaccusative or unergative syntactic behavior, depending on the context in which it is used-that is, depending on the type of event it is used to describe. In Russian, a purportedly unergative verb can come to be in an unaccusative syntactic structure when it is used in the description of an existential event; this syntactic structure is compatible with FCA and the genitive of negation. Finally, FCA in Russian has syntactic properties that differ from those of conjunct-sensitive agreement phenomena in other languages-most notably, it is incompatible with certain sentential elements that presuppose the semantic plurality of the postverbal noun phrases, and, relatedly, it is unacceptable in contexts in which the noun phrases must form a single syntactic constituent. To account for such properties, the analysis presented here holds that FCA in Russian arises only when two verb phrases are immediately conjoined; thus, it differs from languages such as Arabic and Hindi-Urdu, in which two noun phrases are immediately conjoined. Taken together with the analysis of the potential syntactic positions of postverbal nominative arguments, this account of FCA sheds light on constraints on movement out of a coordinated structure, i.e. the Coordinate Structure Constraint (Ross, 1967): under this analysis, the nominative argument with which the verb displays agreement moves covertly out of the coordinated structure to the specifier of TP, in apparent violation of part of the Coordinate Structure Constraint. The analysis presented here suggests that the phenomenon descriptively referred to as FCA should receive distinct analyses across languages, accounting for variation in its distribution crosslinguistically.
Grammar
Linguistics
Natural language
Semantics
Syntax
Krejci, Bonnie
Gribanova, Vera
Stanford University
مطالعه متن کتاب p
[Thesis]
276903
a
Y
