Leiden University Student Repository

Volkova, Sofja Aleksejevna (2016)

Partial agreement in Russian: an Information Structure-driven approach

Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)

The current thesis discusses the topic of partial agreement between a coordinated subject and the agreeing verb in Russian. Previous accounts have pointed out the relevance of word order for the related agreement phenomena in languages like Arabic, Slovenian and Dutch. No proposal has gone beyond describing this factor, and offered an explanation for the role of word order. In this thesis, I present a formal analysis explaining the relevance of word order from the perspective of Information Structure considerations. I show that the structures facilitated by the discourse-related operations enable the establishment of additional agreement, namely agreement in definiteness. Definiteness-driven agreement affects the syntactic and semantic weight of the conjuncts, which poses consequences for the standard phi-feature agreement.

agreement

coordinated subject

full

partial

word order

Information Structure

definiteness

Russian

Author

Volkova, Sofja Aleksejevna

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Research Master: Theoretical Linguistics and Cognition

Supervisors

D'Alessandro, Roberta Anna Grazia

ECTS Credits

30

Language

en