Once again on the grammatical status of an extremely rare construction: Subject-oriented resultatives with the past active participle in Modern Standard Russian
Once again on the grammatical status of an extremely rare construction: Subject-oriented resultatives with the past active participle in Modern Standard Russian

Summary/Abstract: Russian is described in comparative and typological literature as a language with a very strongly restricted subject-oriented resultative. The descriptions assume that in Modern Standard Russian, almost exclusively transitive verbs form an ‘n/t’-participle, so that no participle is available for most intransitive verbs to form a resultative. In this paper, based on corpus evidence and some evidence from the internet, it is shown that in Modern Standard Russian, subject-oriented resultatives can be formed with the past active participle with the suffix ‘-(v)š-’ (‘Оба будете отдохнувшими’ ‘Both of you will be rested’, ‘Дерево должно быть высохшее’ ‘The tree must be dried up’). In terms of the verbal classes from which it is typically formed (intransitive mutative verbs), this construction corresponds to the subject-oriented resultatives of languages with less restricted subject-oriented resultatives, such as German or Czech. This is shown in a comparison with Czech. However, the frequency with which it is found in texts is much lower. Despite its extremely low frequency, this subject-oriented resultative construction of Modern Standard Russian resembles grammatically analogous constructions in other languages.

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