This paper argues against the commonly held assumption that subjects of unaccusative predicates enter the syntactic derivation in the canonical direct object position, as shown in (1a). Rather, I argue that subjects of unaccusatives are merged as the subject of their own Small Clause as shown in (1b), uniting them with copular constructions in Russian and other languages.
(1) a. Standard b. Small Clause Unaccusative Unaccusative VP VP / \ / \ V DP V SC(=PredP) / \ DP (pred)
Moro (1997) proposes a similar syntactic analysis for unaccusatives
based on evidence from Italian existential sentences involving the
verb thematic
are determined by structural relations among
categories and their projections. The role of
While Unaccusativity has been discussed in great detail for the
Romance languages, Slavic unaccusatives raise many new questions. This
paper focuses on one such question: can the syntax of copular
constructions and unaccusatives in Russian be accounted for with the
single underlying structure shown in (1b)? I argue that this is indeed
the case. However, the diagnostics posited for unaccusatives in
Romance cannot be applied to Russian, where the situation is less than
clear. One syntactic fact which Russian existential sentences with the
verb
(2) a. V kvartire ne bylo nikakix devu&shachek;ek. (byt&soft;) in apartment no was no girls-GEN There were no girls in the apartment. b. Nikakix otvetov ne pri&shachek;lo. (unaccusative) no answers-GEN not came No answers came.
However, Genitive of Negation is a poor diagnostic for true
unaccusativity in Russian since it is dependent on factors such as
definiteness, animacy, etc. Therefore, another diagnostic must be
examined. Babyonyshev (1996) discusses the possibility of
conjunction agreement
for unaccusatives in Russian as
in (3a). In Russian, a verb may show singular agreement with the first
conjunct of a conjoined nominative subject if the conjoined subject is
postverbal and the sole argument of an unaccusative verb. I argue that
the small clause structure proposed in (1b) will still allow us to
capture these facts in Russian, with the added advantage of allowing
us to collapse the syntax of two constructions (copular sentences and
unaccusatives) into one structure.
3) a. Unaccusative Na stole stojali/stojala/*stojal pepel&soft;nica i pustoj stakan. On table stood-PL/FEM SG/MASC SG ashtray-FEM and empty glass-MASC On the table stood an ashtray and an empty glass. b. Transitive Stixi pi&shachek;ut/*pi&shachek;et Svetlov i Romanov. poems write-PL/*SG Svetlov i Romanov Svetlov and Romanov write poems.
If time permits, I will discuss the implications of such an
analysis for cases of di-unaccusatives
in Russian as
well, i.e., object experiencer psych verbs, which canonically select
an themes
in the syntax (à la Hale and
Keyser), we force ourselves to adopt a very specific analysis of these
constructions, i.e., the structure in (1b) above.
Babyonyshev, M. 1996.
Hale, K. and Keyser, S.J. 1991.
Moro, A. 1997.