Syntactic and semantic perspectives on first conjunct agreement in Russian
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation is an investigation into the syntax and lexical semantics of the phenomenon of first conjunct agreement (FCA) as it occurs in Russian. An in-depth look at FCA sheds light on the structure of conjunction and its interaction with predicate-argument agreement, as well as on word order variation and argument realization. FCA occurs only when the apparently conjoined nominative noun phrases are postverbal, leading to a "subject-final" word order. For this reason, this dissertation investigates the derivational paths taken by nominative arguments in the Russian clause. The key to understanding the "subject-final" word order is that nominative marked subjects must occupy the specifier of TP, even when pronounced postverbally; that is, they undergo "covert movement". In the realm of lexical semantics, FCA in Russian bears on the problem of variable unaccusative/unergative syntactic behavior. FCA has been characterized as occurring only when the verb is unaccusative or passive (Babyonyshev, 1996); however, this generalization is not absolute: under specific circumstances, FCA can occur in sentences in which the verb is typically considered unergative. This dissertation presents a solution to the general problem of variable unaccusative/unergative behavior by proposing a model of the relationships among happenings in the real world, verb meaning, and syntactic representation. The model shows how a single verb root can be associated with either unaccusative or unergative syntactic behavior, depending on the type of event it describes. In Russian, a purportedly unergative verb can be in an unaccusative syntactic structure when it is used to describe an existential event, precisely the type of event that is represented in FCA. Finally, FCA in Russian has syntactic properties that differ from those of conjunct-sensitive agreement phenomena in other languages—it is unacceptable in contexts in which the noun phrases must form a single syntactic constituent that is semantically plural. The analysis presented here holds that FCA in Russian arises only when two verb phrases are immediately conjoined and not two noun phrases, as in other languages with FCA. Taken together with the analysis of the syntactic positions of postverbal nominative arguments, this account of FCA helps clarify the appropriate constraints on movement out of a coordinated structure, i.e. the Coordinate Structure Constraint (Ross, 1967). This approach suggests that the phenomenon descriptively referred to as FCA should receive distinct analyses across languages, accounting for variation in its distribution crosslinguistically.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Krejci, Bonnie |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Gribanova, Vera |
| Degree supervisor | Levin, Beth, 1955- |
| Thesis advisor | Gribanova, Vera |
| Thesis advisor | Levin, Beth, 1955- |
| Thesis advisor | Harizanov, Boris |
| Thesis advisor | Kiparsky, Paul |
| Degree committee member | Harizanov, Boris |
| Degree committee member | Kiparsky, Paul |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Linguistics |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Bonnie Krejci. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Linguistics. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Bonnie Krejci
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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