Word Order, Intonation and Thetic Sentences in Russian

The talk given in London at the Linguistic Association of Great Britain conference LAGB 2013 (28-31.08.2013)  is devoted to the derivation of word order and intonation of Russian thetic sentences in the framework of generative-transformational grammar and formal typology. Following statements on the data are made. 1. Modern Russian is a SVO language with scrambling of arguments. VS-word orders are attested both in thetic and categorical sentences and possible with all verb classes – unaccusatives, unergatives and transitives. VS, VSO, VOS-orders can be linked with different types of information structure, so that each word order allows two or more different communicative readings [Kovtunova 1976]. 2. Russian is a language with direct accent marking of communicative constituents (theme, rheme, focus of contrast etc.). The theme in Russian declaratives gets a characteristic accent marking, the so called Intonation Construction 3 (IC-3) – steep rise with a fall on post-tonics (LH*L-L%). The same intonation construction albeit in a higher register and wider range is used for marking Russian yes-no questions [Ode 2003]. 3. There are two subtypes of Russian thetic sentences – context-independent sentences like Vesna prišla (SV)~ Prišla vesna (VS) ‘The spring came’ and context-dependent sentences called ‘sentences with an inherent theme’ in the Russian linguistic tradition, e.g. Babuška spit ‘ Grandma is asleep’ [Baranov, Kobozeva 1983]. Both subtypes can be realized both with SV and VS-orders. Both subtypes lack an accented theme marked with IC-3 [Yanko 2001]. Russian allows transitive thetic sentences, they mostly fall with the context-dependent subtype, cf. example (1).

Comments.

The generative-transformational framework outlined here is based on the insights of Kovtunova (1976) who proposed the notion of 'linear-intonational paradigm', i. e.  set of sentences sharing the same numeration but exhibiting different word order or information structure and Yanko (2001) who develoved Kovtunova's approach and expanded its coverage to all core types of Russian sentences. Derived word orders and IS in this framework are generated by context-dependent rules called 'linear-accent transformations' (Paducheva 1985).

The formalization of Kovtunova's model in terms of Stablerian formal grammars operating with mildly-context-sensitive rules has been proposed in Zimmerling (2008), cf. the English version Zimmerling (2014) in the 'Related works' section. A detailed analysis of Russian thetic sentences is available in Zimmerling (2016).

Unlike Paducheva (1985) and Yanko (2001; 2008), I put the accent tags before the corresponding word form, not after it. I also use a special tag 'zero subscript' for the deaccented elements.

Mind that with the linear-accent approach, deaccenting of non-clitic words is always interpreted as a by-product of linear-accent transformations.