Subordinate subject deletion in Russian

Abstract

Most, if not all natural languages possess complex sentences in which one single noun phrase serves as the superficial subject for two or more verbs. The most obvious case is the one involving sentences with co-ordinate verb phrases as in (1): (1) the man hit the girl and kicked the boy However, inasmuch as in the case of co-ordinate constructions one single noun phrase can also serve as the object of two or more verbs, such constructions will not be our concern in this paper. That is, any analysis that can characterize a sentence such as (1), can also characterize a sentence such as (2), where the girl is the object of both hit and kicked. (2) the man hit and kicked the girl In this paper, we will restrict our attention to constructions involving coreferential subordinate subject deletion in Russian, i.e., infinitival, gerundial and participial clauses.* We will demonstrate that, despite many superficial differences, such constructions can be characterized in terms of essentially the same general grammatical process: the deletion of a redundantly repeated, subordinate subject NP. This analysis will be shown to be more adequate than one which requires the postulation of a set of two or more independent transformations which describe the data in an ad hoc way.