From quantitative to semantic analysis

Abstract

The enduring interest in dative subject constructions in Russian may be accounted for by the intriguing fuzziness of their structural and semantic characteristics. It has been generally accepted that constructions with dative subject arguments convey a broad sense of restrained agentivity, which can be realized in modal meanings of volition or obligation, lack of control, and mental or emotional affectedness of the main participant in the event, as denoted by the dative argument. Dative predicative constructions would occupy an intermediate position on productivity scale. The choice of methodology for the analysis of the dataset has been motivated by the following research logic: in the first stage, the analysis should reveal distinctive groups of triples that share similar behavior. The goal of the clustering was to combine similar triples and compare their distribution across the clusters in the eighteenth century vis-a-vis the twenty-first century. The null hypothesis claims the persistence in the twenty-first century of all the eighteenth-century clusters.