Abstract
The paper deals with Russian syntactic constructions prichina, chto P (lit. ‘cause that P’) and prichina togo, chto P with expletive pronoun to in genitive case, that are in most cases interchangeable. The purpose is to describe the syntactic and semantic properties of these constructions in Russian using corpus data. The semantics of the noun prichina ‘cause, reason’ and its argument structure were critically examined, and a representative set of examples where this noun is a part of one of these constructions was analyzed. The following results were obtained: 1) the description of the argument structure of the word prichina was supplemented; 2) the constraint on the use of chtocomplements with deverbative nouns observed in [10] was shown to cover non-deverbative noun-predicate prichina ‘cause’; 3) it was shown that the semantic role of the chto-clause may be either Cause or Effect depending on the syntactic function of the construction; 4) it was determined that both meanings of the noun prichina (objective vs subjective cause) may be expressed in both constructions — with and without to — irrespective of syntactic function of the construction.
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