Pied-piping in Russian relative clauses: A microdiachronic analysis

This paper presents an analysis of the pied-piping phenomenon in Russian relative clauses in the 18th–19th centuries and in present-day Russian. As is well-known, the relative pronoun kotoryj ‘which’ tended to precede its pied-piped head in the 18th–19th centuries and tends to follow it today. This difference, which has mainly been investigated for relativization on genitives, is demonstrated to be valid for a number of heterogeneous syntactic contexts. I propose to account for the syntactic shift undergone by the Russian relative clauses since the 19th century in terms of a more general shift in information structure: I argue that the linear order of the relative pronoun and its head that was acceptable in Russian two centuries ago, is now in contradiction with the modern inventory of felicitous information structure patterns.

On the status of verbal aspect in Russian: A lexicographer’s view

The goal of the paper is to propose a new format of representation of Russian aspectual pairs in an explanatory dictionary. Two issues are being considered: the choice of the representative of an aspectual pair (i.e. the verb in a given pair which gets full lexicographic description in contrast to the other verb, which has just a reference to the former); and the representation of a polysemic aspectual pair. The proposed format satisfi es both the aspectological theory and modern requirements to explication of lexical meaning. New semantic arguments are formulated for understanding the nature (inflectional vs. derivational) of Russian verbal aspect.