ARGUMENT ENCODING IN RUSSIAN EVENT NOMINALS AND CASE THEORY

For Russian event nominals, descriptive grammars posit the following argument encoding strategy: (i) lexically governed arguments of the verbal stem retain their encoding; (ii) arguments that receive structural cases (nominative and accusative) in the finite clause are marked with genitive in nominalizations; (iii) if the verbal stem projects two arguments that need structural cases (i.e. the verb is transitive), in nominalizations the internal argument is marked with genitive, and the external argument — with instrumental. The generalization (iii) supports the traditional characterisation of Russian nominalizations as exhibiting an “ergative” or “passive” strategy of argument encoding, whereas S- and P-arguments receive an unmarked case, and A-argument gets a special encoding.

The paper introduces new empirical data that challenge the universality of previous generalizations which underwent theoretical modeling. Corpus studies and experimental studies reveal an additional model of argument encoding in nominalizations. It turns out that native speakers of Russian use instrumental marking not only for the external argument of transitives, but also for the external argument of unergatives and intransitives.

The two strategies of argument encoding in Russian event nominals receive an explanation within the two formal models of case assignment. The normative strategy which employs instrumental for external arguments of transitive verbal stems exclusively fits perfectly into the configurational case theory of A. Marantz, whereby genitive represents the unmarked case and instrumental — the dependent case. Instrumental encoding of any external argument, on the other hand, can be analyzed as an inherent case assigned to the agent argument by the light verb that projects it.