NON-STRUCTURAL CASE COPYING

The article focuses on Russian constructions where the case of an NP is not acquired from the syntactic head. This phenomenon is characteristic, first of all, of comparative constructions with kak (Mozhet, mne, kak Vase, uexat’ v derevnju? ‘Maybe, I, like Vasja, should go to the village?’) and for constructions with the comparative degree and the marker čem (Mne nado est’ bol’še, čem drugim). The experiment described in the work shows that mainly dative forms are copied, but genitive doubling is also possible. In dative constructions, the dative expresses PRO in the infinitive clause and/or experiencer in the modal predicate. There are several reasons for this non-structural marking : the nature of comparatives, which are intermediate between coordination and subordination; the possibility of avoiding a non-canonical linear position of the standard of comparison (for constructions with the marker kak i). Constructions where non-finite verb forms are copied are structured similarly to case-copying constructions. Finally, Russian has constructions outside the domain of comparison where the form of two constituents must be identical, though only one of them acquires this form by means of canonical head-dependent relations. We also argue that non-structural case assignment does not result from the coordinating properties of comparative constructions; rather, it is motivated by a rule not related to the head-dependent relations, which can be called ‘syntactic doubling/copying’ and can be explained by the semantic symmetry between the object and the standard of comparison.