The Russian Apprehensive Construction: Syntactic Status Reassessed, Negation Vindicated

Predicates of fear and apprehension in Russian can be followed by clauses with a marker of negation that does not alter the truth value of the proposition as in 'Ja bojus’, kak by ne bylo dožd’ja' (I am afraid that it might rain), where it is the possibility of rain that causes the fear and not the contrary. The negative particle ne thus seems superfluous and illogical if the two clauses are assumed to be linked by subordination. This thesis reapplies Jespersen’s insight of paratactic negation (Jespersen 1917) to address this well-known problem of Russian syntax. Corpus-based evidence is presented in support of analyzing clauses with 'kak by' and negation as instantiations of an autonomous, independent-clause construction rather than as embedded complements. By way of corroboration, the historical path along which the construction is likely to have developed is also examined to demonstrate its main-clause origins. While this analysis provides an elegant solution to the problem of...Show morePredicates of fear and apprehension in Russian can be followed by clauses with a marker of negation that does not alter the truth value of the proposition as in 'Ja bojus’, kak by ne bylo dožd’ja' (I am afraid that it might rain), where it is the possibility of rain that causes the fear and not the contrary. The negative particle ne thus seems superfluous and illogical if the two clauses are assumed to be linked by subordination. This thesis reapplies Jespersen’s insight of paratactic negation (Jespersen 1917) to address this well-known problem of Russian syntax. Corpus-based evidence is presented in support of analyzing clauses with 'kak by' and negation as instantiations of an autonomous, independent-clause construction rather than as embedded complements. By way of corroboration, the historical path along which the construction is likely to have developed is also examined to demonstrate its main-clause origins. While this analysis provides an elegant solution to the problem of negation by removing restrictions stemming from the notion of embeddedness, the precise function of negation is explored within an intersubjective approach (Verhagen 2005). The role of negation in the construction is shown to consist in cognitive coordination whereby the speaker instructs the addressee to entertain two mental representations of an apprehension-causing situation and to adopt the one in which this situation is construed as non-existent through the use of negation.Show less

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The Russian Apprehensive Construction: Syntactic Status Reassessed, Negation Vindicated