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Unaccusativity, Distributivity, and Non-Agreement in Russian

Stephanie Harves

Abstract:

In this paper I discuss the syntax of two well-known diagnostics for unaccusativity in Russian: the Genitive of negation construction and distributive po-phrases (first pointed out by Pesetsky 1982). Although each of these constructions has received a great deal of attention in the literature, a unified account of these seemingly disparate diagnostics has yet to be provided. The two distinguishing features that these two constructions share are: (1) the non-agreeing/impersonal morphology that obligatorily appears on the predicate and (2) a lack of Nominative Case on the internal argument. A closer look at non-agreeing predicates in Russian more generally suggests that non-agreement should, in fact, be considered a new diagnostic for unaccusativity, since predicates with agentive subjects obligatorily agree with their external arguments. In order to account for this observation, I will argue that external arguments are syntactically encoded with a [person/participant] feature, since they are volitional controllers of the event expressed by verbal predicates. This feature value requires that the head they check Case against be phi-complete. Direct internal arguments, on the other hand (i.e., direct objects), lack a [person/participant] feature value as undergoers, and may therefore have their Case valued by a phi-incomplete head. This proposal therefore predicts that non-agreeing predicates will never occur in the presence of agentive external arguments in Russian, since external arguments must always have their Case valued by phi-incomplete/non-defective T. In addition, this paper provides further evidence for the presence of an independently motivated [participant] feature, which has been argued by Adger and Harbour (2003) and Anagnostopoulou (2003) to be a crucial feature involved in explaining the cross-linguistic phenomenon of Person Case Constraints (PCC) in French, Greek, and Kiowa as well as the 3rd person restriction on Nominative Objects in Icelandic.

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