Кому проспати заутреня и ловити рыба? Именительный падеж дополнения инфинитива как предмет грамматического описания [Who will sleep through the matins and catch fish? Nominative objects of infinitives as a challenge for linguistic analysis]

Кому проспати заутреня и ловити рыба? Именительный падеж дополнения инфинитива как предмет грамматического описания [Who will sleep through the matins and catch fish? Nominative objects of infinitives as a challenge for linguistic analysis]
Anton Zimmerling
May 2024

This paper addresses the East Slavic/Old Russian construction with nominative case-marking on the infinitival object, cf. zemlja paxati, ryba loviti, which has been a matter of a long debate in Slavic Studies.I argue that the nominative case-marking on infinitival non-subject arguments instantiates the mechanism of differential object marking, since the speakers were able to use both the accusative and the nominative objects in the same syntactic position: the choice of the nominative vs accusative case was triggered by such pragmatic factors as communicative status and referentiality. The data provided by the historical text corpora testify that the modal semantics of the zemlja paxati construction did not favor its use in most types of embedded clauses, especially in infinitival complements of causative and volitive predicates. In these syntactic contexts, the accusative remained the strongly preferred option. With impersonal modal verbs and predicatives, the nominative and the accusative have comparable frequency figures.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008114 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Die Welt der Slaven, 2019, № 2, 299 - 337
keywords:	differential object marking, nominative objects, communicative structure, root clauses, dependent clauses, external modality, old russian, semantics, morphology, syntax
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