Noun complement clauses with a demonstrative determiner in Russian

Abstract

A lesser-known type of noun complement clause construction in Russian is discussed, in which N + čto-clause is preceded by the distal demonstrative tot. The construction involves a non-anaphoric non-deictic use of tot, which depends on the presence of a declarative (or relative) CP. Special distributional properties of the construction are discussed, such as its compatibility with non-attitude nouns like ‘advantage’. A compositional analysis is proposed based on the idea that demonstratives uniformly take two arguments. It is argued that the properties of the construction are captured in a structure proposed in Hankamer & Mikkelsen 2021, with D taking CP as a complement and subsequent raising of D to a little d around the NP.