Nanosyntax of Russian Verbal Prefixes

Abstract

This chapter addresses the problem of widespread polysemy of Russian verbal prefixes and argues that multiple instantiations of a single prefix share a core conceptual meaning and receive the specific denotations as a function of its syntactic position. A link is demonstrated between the inner structure of a prefix and the PP complement of the prefixed verb, illustrated by five polysemous prefixes that demonstrate an asymmetry in admitting PP complements. Although goal prefixes allow only a goal PP, the more complex source prefixes are compatible with both source and goal, and even more route prefixes are compatible with both source and goal, in addition to route complements. Although the source–goal asymmetry has been pointed out for spatial prefixes before, the fact that the same asymmetry holds for nonspatial use is new and exciting and points to a structural identity of the spatial and nonspatial uses of a prefix.

Morphosyntax of specific and non-specific indefinite markers

“…It also seems worth noting at this point that the nanosyntactic framework proves to be useful not only in the case of indefinite markers. So far, the approach has been successful in analyzing the phenomenon of syncretism in many other grammatical domains such as participles (Starke 2006), case (Caha 2009), spatial adpositions (Pantcheva 2011), negation markers (De Clercq 2013), demonstratives (Lander & Haegeman 2016), personal pronouns (Vanden Wyngaerd 2018), wh-pronouns (Wiland 2018;Vangsnes 2013), complementizers (Baunaz & Lander 2018a), verbal prefixes in Slavic (Wiland 2012;Tolskaya 2018), class prefixes in Bantu (Taraldsen 2010;Taraldsen et al 2018) and internal structure of verbs (Taraldsen-Medova & Wiland 2019;Wiland 2019).…”