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The ‘feel like’ construction in Russian and its kin: Implications for the structure of the lexicon1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2014

ANASTASIA SMIRNOVA
ANASTASIA SMIRNOVA*
Affiliation:
Tufts University
*
Author's address: Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University, 111 Miner Hall, Medford, MA 02155, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

Russian has a family of reflexive constructions that have non-canonical syntax and express a variety of meanings that range from disposition (‘I feel like working’) to ability (‘I cannot work here’) and generic assessment of quality (‘I work well here’). Previous analyses assume that these constructions are derived by a regular syntactic rule and postulate a null modal in the structure to account for their semantics (Benedicto 1995, Franks 1995, Rivero & Arregui 2012). Focusing on the ‘feel like’ construction, I show that derivational analyses have difficulty explaining its idiosyncratic properties, including non-canonical agreement (independent of the structural subject), as well as the interpretation of aspect. Moreover, derivational analyses overgeneralize, since only a subset of predicates occur in the ‘feel like’ construction in Russian, as the data from the Russian National Corpus indicate. In order to account for their idiosyncratic properties and semi-productivity, I propose that the ‘feel like’ construction and its kin are stored in the lexicon as constructions (Goldberg 1995; Jackendoff 1997, 2008). The proposed analysis clarifies the status of reflexive constructions in Russian and establishes the scope of cross-linguistic semantic variation by comparing reflexives in Russian to that in other Slavic languages.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 107 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

[1]

I am grateful to Ray Jackendoff for inspiring me to work on this topic, and for his insightful feedback on every stage of this project. I also thank Adele Goldberg for a fruitful discussion and comments on an earlier draft of the paper, as well as four anonymous Journal of Linguistics referees, whose comments helped me to improve the manuscript. Special thanks go to Barbara Tomaszewicz, and Rumen Iliev and Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan for their help with Polish and Bulgarian data, respectively. I also thank Oxana Skorniakova for her thoughtful comments on Russian data and the analysis. The usual disclaimer applies.

Abbreviations used in glosses: 1, 2, 3 = first, second, third person; acc = accusative case; cl = clitic; dat = dative case; fem = feminine gender; gen = genitive case; imprf = imperfective aspect; inch = inchoative; inf = infinitive; masc = masculine gender; neg = negation; neut = neuter gender; nom = nominative case; part = particle; past = past tense; pl = plural; prep = prepositional case; pres = present tense; prf = perfective aspect; refl = reflexive; sg = singular.

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