DIE WELT DER SLAVEN

Agent prominence and movement in Russian third person plural impersonals (“indefinite-personal sentences”)

Daniel Bunčić

Die Welt der Slaven 65 (2020) 2, 297–311

The present paper reports the results of an acceptability judgement test designed to test two hypotheses: first, that the Russian 3pl impersonal construction is affected by agent prominence, i.e. verbs implying a more prominent agent are more acceptable than verbs implying an agent with fewer agentivity features; second, that movement as an agentivity feature should be conceptualized as a gradual category, thus making a fast-moving referent a more prominent agent than one moving slowly. The former hypothesis could be verified, the latter falsified.

Keywords: agentivity, linguistic prominence, verbs of motion, volition, sentience

Bunčić, Daniel, Universität zu Köln; daniel.buncic@uni-koeln.de

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