Locative insertion, definiteness, and free word order in Russian

Date
2001-05
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Calgary
Abstract
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.
Description
Keywords
Linguistics, Russian language, Syntax, Definiteness, Grammar, Comparative and general--Locative constructions
Citation
Mezhevich, I. (2001). Locative insertion, definiteness, and free word order in Russian. Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, 23(Spring), 30-48.