Studia Caroliensia: Papers in Linguistics and Folklore in Honor of Charles E. Gribble

New Syntax in Russian and Lithuanian: The Case of the Adverbial Participle

New Syntax in Russian and lithuanian: The Case of the Adverbial Participle" Gerald R. Greenberg and James E. Lavine Introduction It is a well-known observation that new syntax arises from old morphology. The loss of a particular inflectional paradigm in the history of a language does not necessarily entail the loss of each of the paradigm's exponents. Surviving vestigial forms are typically reanalyzed by subsequent generations of speakers as performing new functions, often with novel syntactic patterns. A particularly interesting case is that of the cognate adverbial participles (gerunds) in Russian and Lithuanian (the deeprii'astie and padalyvis, respectively).l An historical comparative analysis of gerunds in these languages reveals that the considerable syntactic differences that we will examine follow directly from reduction in the nominal declension of present and past active participles. This paper has two primary goals. The first is the purely empirical task of identifying the source of the syntactic differences in the modern gerund of Russian and Lithuanian. The second, more ambitious, goal is to demonstrate that small changes in an old inflectional paradigm can conspire with universal and quite general properties of human language to produce considerable * We are grateful to William Schmalstieg for extensive discussion of the Old Lithuanian data presented in section 2.2. We also thank Evelina Guzauskyte and Virginija Vasiliauskiene for checking the Modern Lithuanian data and for making many useful suggestions. Finally, we acknowledge the many useful comments from the paper's reviewers, Leonard Babby and Charles Townsend, and from the paper's editor, Ernest Scatton. Naturally, any errors in the interpretation and analysis of these data remain our own. 1 We use the term "gerund" in the text for the sake of convenience, while acknowledging that it is potentially confusing in English and that perhaps "adverbial participle" more accurately describes these forms. The gerunds in the two languages are cognate forms only to the extent that they are both derived from the same (old) nominal declension of adjectives and participles. As we will see in Section 2, they are not, however, derived from the same tokens of this discontinued paradigm. Robert Rothstein, Ernest Seatton, and Charles E. Townsend, eds. Studia Caroliensia: Papers in Linguistics and Folkore in Honor of Charles f. Cribble. Bloomington, IN: Siavica, 2006, 143- 70. 144 GERALD R. GREENBURG AND JAMES E. LAVINE syntactic reshuffling, resulting in an entirely divergent syntax of cognate forms in two relatively closely related languages2 It has long been noted that Russian gerund phrases are referentially dependent on the main-clause subject, the gerund's controller, as in (1) (where co-indexation indicates co-reference). (1) Russian Tanja, Tanja:NOM usia, left ne NEG pocelovavsis', kiss:PERF.GER 'Tanja left, not having kissed her mother.' s with mamoj. mother In the standard language, this requirement of referential dependency rules out sentences such as (2), in which either the gerund itself has no such reference (it is a zero-place predicate) as in (2a), or the main clause within which it is embedded has no such reference, as in (2b): (2) Russian a. *Tak bystro stemnev, my ne so quickly grew-dark:PERF.GER we:NOM NEG mogli uvidet' dorogu. could to-see road:ACC 'It having grown dark so quickly, we couldn't see the road.' b. *Idja domoj, poxolodalo. walking:IMP.GER home became-cold:IMPERS 'While walking home, it got cold.' Our main observation is that the Lithuanian variants of the sentences in (2a-b), given in (3a-b), are entirely grammatical. (3) Lithuanian a. Taip so sparCiai fast nebegalt"jome could-not ne PRT sutemus, grew-dark:PST.GER tako pathoGEN jziureti. to-see mes we:NOM 'It having grown dark so fast, we couldn't even see the path.' (Ambrazas et al. 1997: 676) 2 This idea is loosely inspired by Longobardi's 2001 study of the etymology and syntax of modern-day French chez from Latin ensa. NEW SYNTAX IN RUSSIAN AND lITHUANAIN: THE CASE OF THE ADVERBIAL PRI NCIPLE 145 (3) b. Einant walking:PRS.GER nama, pasalo. home became-cold 'While walking home, it got cold.' Whatever accounts for the ungrammaticality of Russian gerunds in (2) must be shown not to apply equally to the cognate forms in Lithuanian (3). Note finally the case of intransitive predicates with a single Nominative Theme (unaccusatives). Nominative Themes, especially if inanimate, fail to control in Russian, as in (4a), since no coreference can...