MAIN CLAUSE PHENOMENA IN COMPLEMENT CLAUSES HEADED BY THE VERB DUMAT’ ‘THINK’

Russian mental verbs can take asyndetic complements. In these constructions the matrix clause shows some properties of a parenthetical (it cannot contain negation). However, it does not belong to the parentheticals, while it can host focus and topic particles, specific types of adjuncts, epistemic expressions, common nouns in the subject position, etc.

This work is aimed at the analysis of main clause phenomena in the matrix and dependent clauses of the complement constructions, headed by the verb dumat’ (‘think’), in the meaning of ‘believe, guess, suppose’. This is based on the list of main clause phenomena in Russian, suggested by E. V. Paducheva (1990). It includes expressions of illocutionary force of the utterance and lexemes/constructions that are only used in certain illocutionary types (e.g. chestno govoria (‘honestly’), v samom dele (‘as a matter of fact’)), deictic markers von (‘that there’) and vot (‘this here), the deictic ellipsis of the subject, and lexemes and constructions that encode the information structure of the utterance.

I show that both the matrix and the complement clause in the constructions under discussion can host main clause phenomena. By contrast, they are not acceptable in parentheticals with dumat’. Thus, the results obtained in this paper can be used as an additional argument for classifying the discussed constructions as asyndetic complement constructions, not as parentheticals.