Russian instrumental nominals. A contrastive analysis with catalan
- Autores: Lidia Bogatyreva
- Directores de la Tesis: Olga Borik (dir. tes.), María Teresa Espinal Farre (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2014
- Idioma: inglés
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Gemma Rigau Oliver (presid.), Louise Elisabeth Mcnally Seifert (secret.), Boban Arsenijevic (voc.)
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TESEO
- Resumen
This dissertation explores the syntactic and semantic properties of nominals that bear instrumental case in Russian. It investigates the syntactic position that such nominals occupy in syntax, as well as the correlation that exists between this syntactic characterization and the semantic interpretation they may obtain.
The main goal of this research is to characterize instrumental nominals at the syntax-semantics interface. In order to achieve this major goal, several instantiations of instrumental case are analysed, namely nominal predicates, cognate nominals and instrumental nominals that combine with certain verbs.
From a syntactic point of view, it is argued that the assignment of instrumental case in Russian is structural and it is shown that all nominals in instrumental case share a common syntactic structure: instrumental case is assigned to the nominal in the complement position of a prepositional-like functional projection F denoting central coincidence.
From the semantic point of view, it is argued that Case is one of the tools that universal grammar uses to distinguish between semantically different types of nominal, namely between those that behave as canonical arguments and those that behave as modifiers. Several properties of instrumental nominals will be discussed (such as lack of referentiality, inability to combine with demonstratives and impossibility of pronominalization) that support the conclusion that instrumental is an instantiation of a weak case. Semantically speaking, instrumental nominals either have a property-type denotation or are interpreted as modifiers of the event denoted by the predicate.
The novelty of the analysis presented in this dissertation is twofold. On the one hand, it provides a common account for different types of instrumental nominals that had not been brought together in the previous literature on this topic. On the other hand, it provides a cross-linguistic perspective to the research, drawing some syntactic and semantic parallels between nominal predicates and cognate nominals in Russian and Catalan.
