Noun as a Verb
Noun as a Verb

Summary/Abstract: The paper explores the phenomenon of using nouns in place of verbs in performative speech acts,particularly in the context of requests. A key example is the Russian construction Našedšego ključiprosʹba vernutʹ ‘Whoever finds the keys, please return them’, lit. ‘a request to the finder to return’,which, while non-standard, is widely used in speech. The use of nouns instead of verbs in performativeutterances is not unique. For instance, saying Moi pozdravlenija! ‘My congratulations!’ insteadof Pozdravliaju vas ‘I congratulate you’ reflects a similar phenomenon. This tendency often arisesbecause speakers aim to avoid the implied intimacy implied by 1st/2nd-person pronouns and verbforms, especially in formal or less intimate communication. The peculiarity of the Russian wordprosʹba ‘request’ in contrast to similar words (e.g., molʹba ‘plea’) is that in performative usage it developsunique government patterns. Specifically, it governs the accusative case to indicate the addresseeas a semantic argument of the word prosʹba, borrowing this pattern from the transitive verb prositʹ‘to ask’. This reveals an unexpected connection between performativity and the syntactic behavior ofthe word, highlighting how performative contexts can influence grammatical structures.

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