Argument structure of adverbial derivatives in Russian

Adverbial derivatives (AdvD) of nouns of the type v jarosti ‘in a rage’, s naslaždeniem ‘with pleasure’, pod predlogom ‘under the pretext of’ etc. often inherit the arguments (actants) of the noun they are derived from. However, as a rule, in case of AdvDs these arguments are realized in a way very different from the nouns. The main linguistic findings of the paper consist in the set of positions the arguments may take with respect to AdvD. In a general case, a actant slot of an AdvD can be either (a) blocked, or (b) filled by a dependent of the AdvD itself (e.g. pod predlogom bolezni ‘under the pretext of illness’, v dokazatel’stvo svoej nevinovnosti ‘as a proof of his innocence’), or (c) filled by the dominating verb (po privyčke prosnulsja rano ‘woke up early out of habit’, slushal pesnju s naslaždeniem ‘listened to the song with relish’), or (d) filled somewhere within the clause organized by the dominating verb; in this case the AdvD argument may be identified based on (d1) its syntactic position (po privyčke ‘by habit’), or (d2) its semantic role with respect to its mother element (v podarok ‘as a present’), or (d3) its communicative function (v bol’šinstve ‘mostly’). A notation is proposed that permits to present the argument structure of AdvDs in a compact way.