THE ANIMATE ACCUSATIVE FORM OF THE PRONOUN KOTORYJ ‘WHICH’

The Russian relative pronoun kotoryj ‘which’ sometimes appears in the animate accusative form, even though the head noun would receive the inanimate morphological marking in the same context. This kind of animacy mismatch is observed in relative clauses headed by masculine collective nouns with reference to people, such as narod ‘nation’, and neuter nouns with reference to animates, such as životnoe ‘animal’. This phenomenon cannot be subsumed under the notion of semantic agreement. The expected semantic agreement pattern with collective nouns implies plural animate forms, while the examples in question include singular forms. The animate accusative form after neuter nouns could be treated as a masculine form corresponding to a masculine referent, however this kind of semantic agreement is ungrammatical in non-accusative forms, and the masculine forms are used even if the referent is feminine. This animacy mismatch in Russian is closely paralleled by the better studied data of other Slavic languages, especially Croatian, where the relative pronoun can take animate marking after masculine or neuter nouns, irrespective of their semantics. Another parallel is provided by other Russian pronouns, especially the reciprocal pronoun odin drugogo ‘one another’, which receives animate marking in the same range of contexts as the relative pronoun kotoryj ‘which’. The data suggests that relative pronouns are higher on the animacy hierarchy than nouns, but lower than personal pronouns.