Russian predicatives. Grammar. Statistics, Author experiments [Русские предикативы. Грамматика, статистика, авторские эксперименты]

This is a slightly expanded version of my talk given 16 January, 2019 at the memorial V.V.Vinogradov's readings organized by Lomonosov Moscow University. I discuss the grammar and corpus stats of one productive Russian dative-predicative construction and argue that bizarre or experimental uses of this constructions by Russian authors from XIX-XXI in most cases do not undermine the rigidity of the grammatical constraints. Comments: Victor V. Vinogradov (1895 - 1969) is considered one of the pillars of the Moscow linguistic school. There are at least two series of ongoing Vinogradov readings in Moscow - this one organized by the Lomonosov Moscow University and the alternative series organized by the Vinogradov Russian Language Institute, Russian Academy of Science. The topic of my talk is directly related to Vinogradov's research. Vinogradov was an ardent supporter of Lev Shcherba (1880 - 1944) who proposed the hypothesis according to which non-agreeing nominal predicatives make up a new part of speech called 'category of state'. The core of this controversial word class consists of dative predicatives, i.e. predicatives taking dative subjects and licensing the dative-predicative construction. This claim goes back to Nikolai Pospelov (1890 - 1984) who published an important article on that subject in 1955. The same year, Alexander Isachenko (1910 - 1978) introduced the umbrella term 'predicative' instead of the notorious 'category of state' label. The term 'predicative' is used, e.g. by Pavel Lekant (1932 - 2019), whose own version of Shcherba's hypothesis is more close to Vinogradov's account than to Pospelov's 1955 revision. I share with the Schcherbian tradition the sentiment that one needs to account for specific features of Russian grammar and lexicon but unlike the followers of Shcherba and Vinogradov, I do not think that an explanation in terms of parts of speech captures the semantics and morphosyntax of Russian predicatives in the best way possible.