The Slavic clausative-presentative construction

Abstract

The paper describes the clausative-presentative construction [Claus-PresC], a particular type of the presentative construction found in Slavic languages, using data from Russian and Serbian. The Claus-PresC is headed by a special presentative lexeme that is a clausative (i.e., can constitute a clause by itself or together with its obligatory actant): Rus. ÈTO / Serb. TO ‘that.situation.is [Y]’ and Rus. VOT / Serb. EVO ‘I.indicate.here [Y]’. Such a lexeme takes as its actant, the presentee, a fully independent clause (i.e., a clause without a complementizer), which is, typologically speaking, a rare occurrence.

We show that the semantic and syntactic properties of the Claus-PresC follow directly from the lexical meanings of the clausative-presentative lexemes that head it, with a conclusion that the Claus-PresC is a syntactic construction only in a very general and vague sense of the term (‘a configuration of syntactically linked items’) that applies to any syntactic phrase. The Claus-PresC—a clausative with its actant—is contrasted with the cleft construction, with which is it sometimes equated in the literature, the latter being a genuine syntactic construction.

The discussion is carried out within the dependency-based, synthesis-oriented framework of the Meaning-Text linguistic theory.