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Conditions on the Formation of Middles in Russian
- Journal of Slavic Linguistics
- Slavica Publishers
- Volume 18, Number 2, Summer - Fall 2010
- pp. 291-335
- 10.1353/jsl.2010.0003
- Article
- Additional Information
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.