More of a good thing: Russian Synthetic and Analytic comparatives

Poljarnyj vestnik, 2016

Rival forms, i.e. forms that appear to have the same function, have long been an important issue that many linguists are paying attention to. Rivalry is interesting because it has implications for inter alia variation and language change. Examples of rival forms are morphological doublets like -ness and -ity in English (Szymanek 2005, 441). In this paper I explore the rivalry between comparatives in the predicative position in Russian. My findings lend support to the “cocktail hypothesis” described in Nesset (2016), whereby the choice of one of the rival forms depends on the interplay of diverse factors. As argued in the present study, the most important factors that determine the choice of comparative forms are the length of the adjective, its frequency and the year when the text with the relevant example was published.

The paper discusses the semantics of Russian comparatives with the attenuative prefix po-like pobol'še 'somewhat more' or poumnee 'a bit cleverer'. It is shown that they have two major types of usage, the comparative one and the selective one. The former is close to the semantics of the standard comparative degree of adjectives and adverbs, while the latter is closer to the semantics of the superlative. Within the comparative type a special case is described: the correlative construction which contains two attenuatives. Its outstanding feature is cross-filling of valency slots of the comparatives.

In and across languages, there are often multiple compositional roads to the same meaning. We can thus arrive at identical truth conditions in very different fashions. This paper discusses just such a case, namely variation in the lexical inventory of comparative operators: In Russian as well as crosslinguistically, one and the same comparison is arrived at by very different lexical and structural means. More specifically, we argue that genitive-marked synthetic comparatives in Russian provide evidence for the phrasal comparative operator proposed in Kennedy (1997). We also show that this operator doesn’t always have to be interpreted in situ, contrary to the claims in Beck, Hohaus & Tiemann (2012).

Studia Linguistica

The paper provides evidence for a more articulated structure of the comparative as compared with the one in Bobaljik (2012). We propose to split up Bobaljik's cmpr head into two distinct heads, C1 and C2. Looking at Czech, Old Church Slavonic and English, we show that this proposal explains a range of facts about suppletion and allomorphy. A crucial ingredient of our analysis is the claim that ad-* The authors are listed in alphabetical order. We wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for Studia Linguistica, Anna Szabolcsi, Edwin Williams, the ComForT research group at KU Leuven, as well as the audience at the 2018 Olinco conference in Olomouc for their feedback. Pavel Caha's work on this paper was supported by a grant from the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) number GA17-10144S. 2 Caha, De Clercq & Vanden Wyngaerd jectival roots are not a-categorial, but spell out adjectival functional structure. Specifically, we argue that adjectival roots come in various types, differing in the amount of functional structure they spell out. In order to correctly model the competition between roots, we further introduce a Faithfulness Restriction on Cyclic Override, which allows us to dispense with the Elsewhere Principle.

PhD dissertation, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2018

The dissertation deals with Russian morphosyntactic phenomena involving adpositions. It is mostly devoted to a study of the distribution of the so-called pripredložnye ‘adprepositional’ pronouns in Russian. Their seemingly chaotic distribution proved to be hard to account for. Especially puzzling was the fact that beyond the P-object environments these pronouns, ‘n-forms’, appear only in the genitive standard DP of the Russian phrasal comparative, in which no preposition appears. I offer a uniform analysis of n-form distribution in Russian, which maintains the intuition that they are ‘adprepositional’ (occur in P-object positions). However, I refine the generalization stressing that n-forms are only licensed in the complement of P-heads, making a crucial distinction between a vaguely defined group of prepositions and lexemes that are syntactically P-heads. Only ‘prepositions’ that are P-heads license n-forms in their complement. I examine a large group of prepositions in detail, arguing that only some are P-heads. The ‘comparative puzzle’ is solved by proposing that the phrasal comparative involves a null P-head, licensing the genitive n-form in the standard DP. Lexemes labelled prepositions in traditional grammars of Russian are shown to split into three classes. Class I lexemes are P-heads, the only ‘true’ prepositions in a sense. Class II lexemes are structurally ambiguous between N-heads or P-N combinations (the complement being an argument of the nominal head), and a lexicalized P-head composed of syntactically inactive N- and P-elements. Class III lexemes are never P-heads: they are P-N combinations, transitive adverbs (A-heads) or gerunds (V-heads). This part of the dissertation has implications for the typology and morphosyntax of pronouns and case. It may inform studies aimed at classifying adpositions across languages. The classification of ‘prepositions’ developed here may prove relevant for understanding the non-homogeneous behavior of different prepositions in specific constructions. The remaining part of this dissertation delves deeper into the syntax of the genitive standard of comparison in Russian phrasal comparatives. I show that the standard DP and the DP it is contrasted with belong in the same clause. This favors the simple, Direct Analysis of the standard DP, under which it does not involve any silent structure. I offer a new generalization, the Oblique Correlate Constraint, that imposes morphosyntactic restrictions on the standard DP. I show that the constraint quite straightforwardly falls out from a more complex, Reduced Clause Analysis, positing abstract structure behind the standard. Looking at other languages, I suggest that the presence of such a constraint in their phrasal comparative may signal that they should be analyzed as reduced clauses. This adds to the growing body of literature on the structure of phrasal comparatives across languages and contributes to the notorious debate on whether phrasal standards of comparison should be analyzed as simple DPs or as reduced clauses.

This paper presents an investigation into the domain of Russian comparative constructions which has been nearly unexplored (but see (Matushansky 2002)). The issues addressed in this paper could supply linguistic theory with much interesting data on every aspect of comparative constructions. The findings will also have a number of theoretical implications, as we will see below.

2016

2014

We argue that the comparative head that enters into the morphological makeup of the comparative (Bobaljik 2012) is to be split up into two distinct heads (see Caha 2016). Evidence for this claim comes from Czech comparative morphology, root suppletion, and the interaction of Czech suppletion with negation. We further argue that the account for root suppletion that we provide captures the data better than a DM account.

Comparative tautologies in Russian, of the form X kak X ≈ ‘X as any other X’ or ‘X not much different from what X usually is,’ have been the subject of recent studies, predominantly within constructionist approaches (Cotta Ramusino 2019). In particular, it has been pointed out that in idiomatic uses, the two tokens of X differ in referential status—the second token is interpreted predicatively. The present paper assumes a compositional-semantic approach and reports the results of an experimental study of the available literal interpretations of X kak X through the lens of the presupposition-inducing behaviour of focus particles tol’ko and odin. We find that at least for some speakers and some speech situations, the tautological construction is decomposable into a one-place predicate ‘λx.x is like x’ and its argument, similar to the bound readings of first- and second-person pronouns in various languages; in such cases, difference in referential status is unlikely. In its turn, the availability of a bound reading for expressions from open classes, such as proper names and other NPs / DPs, calls into question the assumed peculiarity of the mechanisms postulated for bound personal pronouns.