Quantifier Scope in Russian

Abstract

This paper documents certain quantifier scope ambiguities in Russian and argues that these are derived by means of a covert syntactic movement operation, Quantifier Raising (QR). By doing so, it argues against the popular "frozen scope" view of Russian (Ionin 2003) by showing that optional, non-local QR past vP level must be available in the language in exactly the contexts where it is available in English. Syntactic evidence for the parallelism comes from Inverse Linking, Antecedent Contained Deletion and other contexts that have been argued to point to the existence of QR in English. Additionally, evidence for the availability of subject Reconstruction for scope in Russian (contra Ionin 2003) strongly suggests that the mechanism deriving ambiguity in basic SVO sentences in Russian must involve subject Reconstruction plus object QR to vP, exactly as has been argued to be necessary for English in Johnson (2000; 2001). The conclusion that Russian possesses QR with the same properties known from English suggests that the availability of QR in certain languages or certain constructions should not be tied to the unavailability of Scrambling since Russian also exhibits Scrambling. This conclusion thus carries important implications for other languages still currently taken to be similarly scope frozen due to the availability of Scrambling.

Double‐Object Constructions in Syrian Arabic

“…The base order of internal arguments in this analysis is always theme > recipient. This view is compatible with the analysis of scope freezing due to Antonyuk (), who claims that crosslinguistically, scope freezing between two quantifiers arises when one quantifier moves over another. If the DP + PP frame is basic, then movement of the recipient argument out of the PP over the theme is correctly expected to result in frozen scope between the two arguments.…”

“…The analysis of Russian by Bailyn () and Antonyuk () provides another possible version of the dative‐shift approach to Syrian Arabic. They claim that Russian ditransitives are generated in the base order accusative > dative, and the dative recipient may optionally scramble around the accusative theme.…”

Sentence comprehension in heritage language: Isomorphism, word order, and language transfer

“…It is more difficult to establish a default word order in double object constructions in Russian, like the instrumental ones in Table 1. Some linguists propose that in the Russian underlying phrase structure, DO is followed by IO (Bailyn, 1995(Bailyn, , 2012, but see recent alternative accounts based on Russian scope interpretation in Antonyuk, 2015aAntonyuk, , 2015b. In the National Russian Corpus (http://ruscorpora.ru/new) with disambiguated homophony (6,003,398 words), objects in the accusative case precede indirect objects in the instrumental case 1.35 times more often than immediately follow them, suggesting a frequency preference in favor of the DO > IO pattern (although these counts do not disambiguate different functions of the instrumental case).…”

Slavic Generative Syntax

“…Under the tutelage of Len Babby, together with Edwin Williams and Bob Freidin, Princeton produced quite a few, most notably Lavine (2000), Harves (2001), Medova (2009), and Chidambaram (2013). John Bailyn of Stony Brook University has directed a number of Slavic generative syntax dissertations, including Citko (2000), Marušič (2005), Scott (2012), LaTerza (2014), and Antonyuk (2015). Lastly, at Indiana University, I have directed the following Slavic dissertations which adopt a generative approach: Brown (1996), Lindseth (1996), Yadroff (1999), Kim (2010), and Zanon (2015a).…”