The Conceptual Space of Verbs: Evidence From Russian

This paper has the goal of investigating the nature of membership within the category ‘passive’ and cross-linguistic comparison of constructions, ‘passive’ and otherwise. Topicality measures were collected from the Uppsala Corpus of Russian for passive and active uses of the Russian verbs pisat’/napisat’ ‘to write,’ davat’/dat’ ‘to give,’ and zabyvat’/zabyt’ ‘to forget.’ Croft’s (2001) notion of plotting constructions in ‘conceptual space’ is exploited as a means of cross-linguistic comparison using these topicality measures. Examining the conceptual space of various voice constructions with these Russian verbs, Croft’s generalizations are upheld, their position being consistent whether Referential Distance or Topic Persistence is used as a measure. Finally, data from other typological discourse studies is plotted, noting where various voice constructions pattern, and how this data fits into Croft’s model.