On the Nature of Dative Arguments in Russian Constructions with «Predicatives»

Abstract

Based on diachronic corpus data, the ability of Russian predicatives (категория состояния, items like холодно ‘it is cold’, грустно ‘it is sad’, приятно ‘it is pleasant’) to co-occur with dative Experiencers is compared to the ability of corresponding adjectives to co-occur with Experiencers. The hierarchy (predicatives > short forms of adjectives > long forms of adjectives) is put forward, which reflects decreasing ability to co-occur with dative Experiencers. The predicatives are divided into several classes based on how their syntactic properties are related to properties of corresponding adjectives. It is shown that none of the usual types of analysis (structural-syntactic, derivational, constructional) adequately captures the properties of all the groups of predicatives, but rather that each of these approaches is best suitable for a particular subtype of predicatives. It is hypothesized that a possible way out could be to assume that in the experiential predicative construction the dative position is directly linked with the Experiencer, so that this structure is “blind” to the role structure of the head lexeme. Keywords: Russian; dative; argument structure; predicatives; adjective; corpus linguistics; derivation; constructional approaches; diachrony