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Verb-stranding verb phrase ellipsis and the structure of the Russian verbal complex

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Abstract

This paper investigates novel evidence from Russian Verb-Stranding Verb Phrase Ellipsis (vvpe), and argues for its use as a probe into the syntactic structure of morphophonologically inseparable but morphosyntactically complex verbs. The first step is to distinguish internal argument drop from vvpe, because they appear identical on the surface. I present novel evidence that Russian internal argument drop is illicit in syntactic islands, while vvpe is licit. Once this bifurcation is established, it allows us to explain previously obscured differences in the syntactic licensing of subject vs. internal argument drop in Russian. The second step uses the verb-matching requirement on the stranded verb in Russian vvpe to establish which parts of the verbal complex originate inside the domain of ellipsis, and which parts originate outside. A surprising finding is that the verb-matching properties of the Russian vvpe construction do not align with what has been demonstrated to hold of other languages in which vvpe is available. Unlike the strict matching requirement of Hebrew (Goldberg 2005a, 2005b) or Irish (McCloskey 2011) vvpe, the matching requirement in Russian vvpe appears to be sensitive to discourse factors, at least for certain speakers. This last discovery results in a significant contribution to our understanding of the nature of the identity requirement in ellipsis licensing.

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Notes

  1. An alternative analysis of such constructions is NP ellipsis, as described by Kim (1999). I do not consider that possibility in any detail here, but the strong requirement for verb matching, modulo contrastive focus effects, described in Sect. 3.2.1, should serve as evidence against such an approach just as it serves for evidence against an argument-drop approach.

  2. The traditional negation test is probably irrelevant for Russian, given that negation is always proclitic on the tensed auxiliary or verb.

  3. An alternative analysis for (8) would involve no movement of the verb, instead applying gapping (that is, deletion of an identical verb in the second conjunct of a coordinate structure). For arguments against this possibility, see Bailyn (1995b) and Bowers (1993).

  4. Bailyn’s (1995) paper takes the coordination to be at the VP level, but this is because the paper predates the adoption of vP in the functional layer of the clause. Following Svenonius (2004b), I assume tentatively that v hosts the verb’s theme vowel, which determines numerous properties of the verb (among them argument structure, allomorphic selection, etc.). If this is the case, then coordination here takes place by hypothesis at the vP level.

  5. What I present here is a summary of the properties I find to be most relevant to understanding the difference between the two classes for the purposes of the present discussion; the exposition is by no means exhaustive. I refer the reader to Isačenko (1960), Babko-Malaya (2003), Romanova (2006), Tatevosov (2007), Svenonius (2004a), inter alia, for more detailed discussions.

  6. sp abbreviations found in the Russian glosses are as follows: attn Attenuative; cmlt Cumulative; dmlt Delimitative; dstr Distributive; excs Excessive; incp Inceptive; rpet Repetitive; trmn Terminative.

  7. One possibility, illustrated in (16) and (17), takes prefixes to instantiate phrasal units, with a corresponding change in movement possibilities (i.e., phrasal movement) (Svenonius 2008). I reject this proposal on the basis of the fact that, among other difficulties, a phrasal account would predict word-like or phrase-like phonology for prefixes. In fact, prefixes exhibit phonological characteristics of word-internal elements: for example, they are not subject to word-final devoicing. For more thorough argumentation in favor of the conclusion that the prefixes instantiate syntactic heads, see Tatevosov (2007).

  8. As pointed out by Marcel den Dikken, 2impf and sp instantiate distinct types of aspect. 2impf contribute grammatical (perfective) aspect, while sps contribute adverbial meanings, and have been understood as potential contributors of Aktionsart (Isačenko 1960). This difference in function supports the idea, promoted here (18), that the two affixes should be represented via distinct functional heads, rather than as a head (2impf) and a specifier (sp) of the same projection, as suggested by Svenonius (2004a) and illustrated in (16).

  9. Though see Tatevosov (2007) for an explanation as to why such cases do not destroy the overall generalization.

  10. In (19) and many following examples, the reader will notice that the subject in the clause with the stranded verb is absent. Exploring this very interesting property further lies beyond the scope of the present paper. On the face of it, this effect seems to be discourse-conditioned, since the subject tends to be absent unless it differs from the antecedent subject (see McShane 2005 for a discussion of many of the relevant discourse conditions).

  11. See later sections (Sect. 3.2.2) for elaboration on the nature of this requirement.

  12. See Franks (1995) for more details.

  13. Note that označat′ ‘mean’, just like English mean, is not the type of verb that could normally host null complement anaphora.

  14. Here and throughout the rest of the paper, examples relevant to establishing the difference between object drop and vvpe make use of obligatorily or strongly transitive verbs (either stranded or with a dropped object). This is to exclude the possibility that some examples with missing vP-internal material are acceptable just because the verb is optionally transitive, analogous to English eat. Looking forward, unacceptable examples like (34)–(35), in which neither an object drop nor a vvpe analysis can hold, demonstrate that the verbs involved cannot felicitously appear without a pronounced complement in the absence of object drop or vvpe.

  15. I am very grateful to Maria Polinsky, Adam Milton Morgan, Ekaterina Kravtchenko, and Carlos Gómez Gallo for help in setting up and running this web survey.

  16. A possible explanation may come from observing the structure of the relative clauses used in this judgment task: all had a relativized subject, so that the object could undergo object drop. Looking slightly ahead, I propose in Sect. 3.1.3 that the degraded nature of object drop inside islands is linked to the prohibition on object extraction out of those islands. As Chung and McCloskey (1983) have noted, extraction out of a relative clause with a subject gap is observed to be much more acceptable; several such naturally occurring examples are cited in Chung and McCloskey (1983). If object extraction from a clause with a relativized subject is, for whatever reason, less degraded, then we expect object drop inside that same relative clause in Russian to be likewise less degraded, consistent with the results of this judgment task. Clearly, the status of this generalization will be better understood only in conjunction with much more serious further testing—a task which lies beyond the scope of the present paper.

  17. Thanks to an anonymous NLLT reviewer for pointing out this prediction as a further piece of evidence in favor of this contrast.

  18. (43a) is best when there is some special intonation on v korobku in the response. I take this to be a fact related to the information structural constraints on vvpe and ellipsis more generally.

  19. It is well-known that Russian subject drop is not of the sort found in canonically pro-drop languages like Italian (Franks 1995). Under the view pursued here, the more restricted nature of Russian subject drop may be understood as the result of further constraints on discourse and/or recoverability (McShane 2005).

  20. Examples like (51a) may appear on the surface to be compatible with a finite control analysis of embedded null subjects, well-established for Japanese (Uchibori 2000), Hebrew (Landau 2004), Persian (Hashemipour 1988, 1989; Ghomeshi 2001), and the Balkan languages (Terzi 1997; Landau 2004), among others. However, the Russian cases are not likely to fit this mold. A characteristic of control is that the matrix clause restricts the temporal interpretation of the embedded clause (Bresnan 1982, inter alia). This is true too in instances of finite control, as in Hebrew, where the embedded verb must bear infinitival, future or subjunctive morphology (Landau 2004). Genuine control structures in Russian follow this pattern, in that the verb is always in its infinitive form (50).

    1. (50)
      figure aj

    But as we have seen, the verb in indicative embedding is canonically marked with person and tense (as in (51), (53), (54), for example), and there is no temporal dependency between the matrix and the embedded predicates. Given this preliminary evidence, I conclude here that the examples we are discussing in this section are not in fact instances of finite control, but instead are exemplary of genuine subject drop.

  21. Furthermore, my extensive corpus digging unearthed no convincing examples of verb-stem mismatch in adjunct or relative clause islands.

  22. Thanks to Jeroen van Craenenbroeck and especially Anna Szabolcsi for bringing these issues to my attention. The empirical and theoretical progress made here is in large part the result of those helpful discussions.

  23. An alternative analytical possibility, which I do not address here, is that the contrastive focussing of verbs has the effect of making available an object drop analysis, despite the embedding of the gap in an island. In the discussion that follows I make the assumption that the syntactic licensing condition on object drop discussed in Sect. 3.1.3 should hold regardless of the effects of discourse.

  24. These facts also present a puzzle when considered in the context of Hebrew vvpe, for which it has been claimed that not even contrastive focus of the verbs can license mismatch of the Hebrew verb parts that originate inside the ellipsis domain (Goldberg 2005b).

    1. (69)
      figure bb
    1. (70)
      figure bc

    The examples in (69) and (70), if directly translated into Russian, would of course be licensed; because there is no embedding inside an island here, there is a possibility that the Russian versions of (69) and (70) could be instances of argument drop. Goldberg (2005a) develops Hebrew-specific controls to help rule out object drop, ensuring that (69) and (70) are in fact Hebrew vvpe. The point is that Hebrew vvpe seems to prohibit verb stem mismatch under any circumstances, while Russian vvpe seems to license it, though in a limited subset of speakers and under particular discourse conditions.

  25. The choice of verbs is very limited here, because lps frequently change the argument structure and selectional requirements of the verb to which they attach. This creates an additional difficulty, since the structure of the elided constituent would not be identical in cases where the verbs’ selectional requirements are different (thus rendering the ellipsis potentially unacceptable for independent reasons). I attempt to avoid this problem by employing verbs with the same number and type of internal arguments, but this limits the range of possibilities significantly.

  26. The semelfactive nu has a homophonous but distinct partner, the inchoative suffix, which appears in Russian verbs like merznut′ ‘freeze’. As Markman (2008) notes, such verbs do not get an instantaneous or punctual interpretation and are not relevant for the purposes of the present discussion. Furthermore, there are clear morphological differences between the two (stress placement, and truncation in the past tense).

  27. For our purposes, the affix-induced root-final consonant mutation is irrelevant.

  28. We can still run the test, of course, though it’s not clear what the results actually indicate. The preliminary conclusion seems to be that mismatch of the aspect-controlling vowel is available in the verbs of (92).

    1. (95)
      figure bw

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Acknowledgements

This project has a long history, originating as part of my dissertation and evolving very significantly as a result of extensive input from some very generous people. I am deeply grateful to Jim McCloskey, Jorge Hankamer, Sandy Chung, and Maria Polinsky especially for their mentorship and extensive comments. I am thankful for the very constructive comments of Marcel den Dikken and two anonymous NLLT reviewers. Thanks to Pranav Anand, Arto Anttila, John Bailyn, Ryan Bennett, Željko Bošković, Adrian Brasoveanu, Jeroen van Craenenbroeck, Boris Harizanov, Robert Henderson, Ray Jackendoff, Olga Kagan, Paul Kiparsky, Ruth Kramer, Beth Levin, Jason Merchant, Line Mikkelsen, Justin Nuger, Jaye Padgett, David Pesetsky, Adam Morgan and the Polinsky Lab at Harvard University, Chris Potts, Kyle Rawlins, Ivan Sag, Erik Schoorlemmer, Anna Szabolcsi, Matt Tucker, Yakov Testelec, Michael Wagner, and audiences at UCSC, MIT, NYU, UC Berkeley, Stanford, McGill, LSA 2008/2010 and FASL 17 for their helpful suggestions and comments. I thank the many native Russian speakers who participated in the online judgment task, and especially Boris Glants, Alexander and Irina Gribanov, Olga Kagan, Flora and Anatoly Tomashevsky, and Alla Zeide for discussion of the Russian data. All errors are my own.

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    Vera Gribanova

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Gribanova, V. Verb-stranding verb phrase ellipsis and the structure of the Russian verbal complex. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 31, 91–136 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-012-9183-3

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