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Towards a syntactic analysis of Russian -sja

Прелиминарный синтаксический анализ русского маркера -ся

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Abstract

This paper presents a unifying analysis of the uses of the Russian marker -sja in passives, anticausatives and antipassives. The analysis is couched in terms of Distributed Morphology and does not assume any argument structure on roots, i.e. all arguments are licensed by functional heads. The main proposal that is put forward is that -sja is a head that fulfils two tasks in a derivation: in syntax, it saturates a selectional feature on an argument-introducing head, in semantics, it existentially quantifies over an unsaturated argument variable.

Аннотация

В данной статье предлагается обобщенный анализ употребления русского маркера -ся в пассивных, антикаузативных и антипассивных конструкциях. Анализ выработан на основе модели дистрибуированной морфологии и исходит из гипотезы, что корни глагола не носят информации о структуре аргументов, т.е. все глагольные аргументы определяются функциональными вершинами. Выдвигается гипотеза о том, что -ся является функциональной вершиной, выполняющей две задачи в деривации: в синтаксисе она сатурирует селекционный признак другой вершиной, лицензирующей аргумент, в семантике она выполняет функцию квантора существования, т.е. она квантифицирует незаполненную переменную.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Slavistik, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany

    Marcel Guhl

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  1. Marcel Guhl
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Correspondence to Marcel Guhl.

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This paper is the extended version of a talk I gave at the Workshop ‘Verbargumente in Semantik und Syntax’ in Göttingen (January 2010). I would like to thank the audience of the workshop as well as Johannes Dölling, Petr Biskup and an anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments. Thanks for their help with the Russian data go to Maria Yastrebova, Alexander Grenz and Natalja Börner. The paper presents work in progress that is related to my dissertation project on the Russian affix -sja (Guhl, M. in progress. Zur Syntax des Markers -sja im Russischen).

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Guhl, M. Towards a syntactic analysis of Russian -sja . Russ Linguist 34, 261–283 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-010-9061-8

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