English Compounds and Russian Relational Adjectives

English noun-noun compounds are often translated into Russian as relational adjective-noun constructions with the adjective parallel in function to the non-head noun of a compound. However, a large subclass of English compounds which are sometimes referred to as ‘deverbal’ do not have a relational adjective-noun equivalent in Russian. In deverbal compounds (e.g. van driver), as opposed to so-called ‘root’ compounds (e.g. bookstore), the head noun is derived from a verb and the non-head noun is interpreted as an internal argument of the head noun. In Russian, the same meaning is expressed by means of a genitive construction. It is proposed that this restriction is due to the morphological difference between English compounds and Russian relational adjective-noun constructions. Following Chomsky (1970) and others, nouns derived from transitive verbs may retain the internal arguments of their base verbs. Kayne (1981) shows that internal arguments may only be expressed as DPs and never as APs. Assuming that internal arguments are realized within the lowest maximal projection of their heads (Williams, 1981), adjectives may not express internal arguments because they are adjuncts and as such are realized outside of the lowest maximal projection. Thus, in English deverbal compounds, the non-head member can express an internal argument, whereas it is impossible in Russian since the non-head member of the construction is an adjective

Locative insertion, definiteness, and free word order in Russian

In this paper, I examine Russian data in terms of definiteness versus indefiniteness and locative inversion. The latter is investigated in Bresnan (1994). She presents an analysis of locative inversion in English and Chichewa and discusses the restrictions on locative inversion in these languages. In particular, she shows that, in English, locative inversion is permitted with many intransitive verbs and passivized transitive verbs (taking into account the by-phrase restriction), but is disallowed with transitive verbs. This generalization applies to Russian verbs as well. The notion of definiteness, however, requires clarification. As a starting point I adopt the definition proposed by Kramsky (1972:30): "By the term "determinedness" we understand the fact that nouns are classified according to whether the content expressed by the noun is clear and identifiable in a concrete way or not". This definition is vague and, therefore not very helpful. In the course of this paper, I will attempt to achieve a more precise formulation of definiteness.Ye

Featuring Russian tense: a feature-theoretic account of the Russian tense system

Bibliography: p. 235-24

Resultatives, particles, prefixes and argument structure

In this paper, I discuss the argument status of postverbal DPs in English resultative constructions, English verb-particle constructions and Russian prefixed verbs. I argue that postverbal DPs in English resultative constructions on the one hand and verb-particle constructions and Russian prefixed verbs on the other hand have different argument status. As shown by various studies, English resultatives are syntactically derived constructions (Carrier and Randall 1992; Neeleman and Weerman 1993; Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995, among others), whereas Russian prefixed verbs are lexically derived (Townsend 1975; Brecht 1985, Zaliznjak and Shmelev 1997, among others). I assume that lexical derivation as opposed to syntactic derivation is less productive and may change a verb's meaning in an unpredictable way. As a result, Russian prefixed verbs and English verb-particle constructions often have different meaning from their base verbs and may have different arguments.Ye