Weak referentiality and Russian instrumental nominals
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Lidia Bogatyreva
Abstract
This paper focuses on weak instrumental nominals in Russian and it shows their similarities, both from a semantic and a syntactic point of view, with bare predicates in Romance languages, namely Catalan. These nominal expressions are property-denoting expressions that show non-unique reference. We extend the analysis proposed for predicate nominals to other instrumental nominals in Russian: nominal adjuncts, cognate adjuncts, and manner cognate objects. We analyze these bare nominals as objects of an abstract function F which is postulated either subordinate to a light verb, where it projects the property-type attributed to Ninstr, or is adjoined to a verbal predicate, where it is interpreted as introducing a modification of the event predicate.
Abstract
This paper focuses on weak instrumental nominals in Russian and it shows their similarities, both from a semantic and a syntactic point of view, with bare predicates in Romance languages, namely Catalan. These nominal expressions are property-denoting expressions that show non-unique reference. We extend the analysis proposed for predicate nominals to other instrumental nominals in Russian: nominal adjuncts, cognate adjuncts, and manner cognate objects. We analyze these bare nominals as objects of an abstract function F which is postulated either subordinate to a light verb, where it projects the property-type attributed to Ninstr, or is adjoined to a verbal predicate, where it is interpreted as introducing a modification of the event predicate.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- List of contributors vii
- List of abbreviations ix
- Advances in weak referentiality 1
- Modal inferences in marked indefinites 17
- Epistemic and scopal properties of some indefinites 45
- Antonymic prepositions and weak referentiality 73
- Weak referentiality and Russian instrumental nominals 101
- Predicate nominals in Papiamentu 129
- Many a plural 157
- Telic definites and their prepositions 183
- How weak and how definite are Weak Definites? 213
- Modified weak definites 237
- Functional frames in the interpretation of weak nominals 265
- Unscrambling the lexical nature of weak definites 287
- Inalienable possession 311
- Basque nominals 335
- Referential properties of definites and salience spreading 365
- Index 389
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- List of contributors vii
- List of abbreviations ix
- Advances in weak referentiality 1
- Modal inferences in marked indefinites 17
- Epistemic and scopal properties of some indefinites 45
- Antonymic prepositions and weak referentiality 73
- Weak referentiality and Russian instrumental nominals 101
- Predicate nominals in Papiamentu 129
- Many a plural 157
- Telic definites and their prepositions 183
- How weak and how definite are Weak Definites? 213
- Modified weak definites 237
- Functional frames in the interpretation of weak nominals 265
- Unscrambling the lexical nature of weak definites 287
- Inalienable possession 311
- Basque nominals 335
- Referential properties of definites and salience spreading 365
- Index 389
