ANIMACY: LESSONS FROM RUSSIAN

 This paper is addressed the role of the animacy feature in the Russian grammar, with focus on Russian verbal impersonal constructions and copular structures with non-verbal predicatives. I argue that animacy as the classifying category of Russian nouns (ANIM I) is a scalar feature, while animacy as the restrictive condition blocking ill-formed combinations of syntactic elements (ANIM II) is construed as a discrete binary feature. Different arguments of the verbal impersonal and copular predicative constructions display different settings of the binary feature ANIM II. Moreover, different settings of ± ANIM II characterize different groups of the predicative lexicon used in these Russian constructions. Transitive impersonals with a silent agentive subject are not licensed in Russian with verbs denoting actions which are only fulfilled by an + ANIM II subject in the basic diathesis in the active voice (видеть, подрезать автомобиль). The majority of speakers do not license causative predicates like ставить, уменьшить in this construction. On the contrary, the arbitrary impersonals with the verb form in 3Pl are only licensed in Russian with those verbs that license an + ANIM II subject. These facts prove that Russian transitive impersonals and Russian arbitrary impersonals are distributed complementarily in the majority of the lexical groups. The subject argument of the Russian dative-predicative-structures (Х-у стыдно, нужно, тяжело) case-marked with the dative case is invariably specified as + ANIM II, while the subject argument of the Russian dative-infinitive-structures overtly marked by the same case has the setting + ANIM II, i.e. can be both animate and non-animate. The combination of the constraints imposed on the selection of the predicates with the factors constraining the choice of their arguments sets outs the settings of the Russian grammar in its present shape.