THE SEMANTIC SUBJECT IN RUSSIAN IMPERSONAL SENTENCES

Impersonal Russian Sentences with the Subject in the Accusative Case and the Meaning of a Person\'s Physical Condition in the Terms of Persian Language

In this article, considering impersonal sentences with the subject in the accusative case, which conveys the physical state of a living being, an attempt is made to compare them with the Persian correlates. This type of impersonal sentences can cause different problems for the Persian-speaking students due to their grammatical specificity (e.g. the uses of the subject in the accusative, rather ...

Semantic ambiguity and syntactic bootstrapping: The case of conjoined-subject intransitive sentences.

When learning verb meanings, learners capitalize on universal linguistic correspondences between syntactic and semantic structure. For instance, upon hearing the transitive sentence "the boy is glorping the girl" two-year olds prefer a two-participant event (e.g., a boy making a girl spin) over two simultaneous one-participant events (a boy and a girl separately spinning). However, two- and thr...

Subject Ellipsis in Russian and Polish*

Polish and Russian are partial pro-drop languages with different patterns of subject realization: whereas pronominal subjects are more commonly elided in Polish, they are more commonly overt in Russian. This suggests an approach to modeling ellipsis that begins with the parameter baseline subject realization with the values overt and elided. Once a language has been thus parameterized (overt fo...

Existential Sentences, Be, and the Genitive of Negation in Russian

The Genitive of Negation (Gen Neg) in Russian involves alternation of Genitive with Nominative or Accusative under conditions which have been debated for many decades. What gives the construction its name is that Gen Neg occurs only under sentential negation; other allegedly crucial factors include topic-focus structure, unaccusativity, perspectival structure, the lexical semantics of the verb,...

Clausal architecture and subject positions: impersonal constructions in the Germanic languages