Conditions on the Formation of Middles in Russian

Abstract

This paper presents a VP account of the adverbial modification required, in some way, by the middle construction in Russian and the related construction in English: Kartoška počistilas' legko 'The potato peeled easily.' The account develops a syntax and semantics for the adverbial middle (Type I: Ackema and Schoorlemmer 2006) that is free of various requirements often supposed for it, notably an "implicit agent" and a generic interpretation. The main condition on adverbial middle formation is access to an embedded state predicate of the object in the logical structure of the head.