Raising doubts about Russian impersonals

The Russian data presented in Perlmutter and Moore (2002) seem to call into question the standard analysis of raising within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG): In Russian, the case marking of the raising target and raising pivot does not seem to be shared. In this paper, we show that the phenomena described by Perlmutter and Moore can receive another analysis, fully compatible with HPSG’s theory of raising. We argue in addition that our account leads to a slightly simpler model of the Russian data than Perlmutter and Moore’s. Crucially, our analysis is only available if we avail ourselves of a rich network of language-specific constructional schemata, a stance recently advocated within HPSG, following the lead of Construction Grammar. The Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar analysis of raising, as presented in Pollard and Sag (1994), differs from other constraint-based lexicalist frameworks (e.g., Construction Grammar or Lexical-Functional Grammar)1) in distinguishing between raising and control structures. In the case of control, only the index of the controller is identified with the index of the control target (making control an instance of binding). In the case of raising, the entire synsem of the raised NP or raising pivot is identical to the embedded predicate’s subject argument’s synsem or raising target. Thus, in Figure 1, which represents part of the lexical entry of raising verbs, the first member of the ARG-ST list (corresponding to the subject in Nominative-Accusative languages) is identified with the first member of the argument structure of the second member of the ARG-ST (the verbal complement), as indicated by 1 . As a consequence, the case value of these two synsems must be identical (what we informally represented through an identically named variable x). One advantage of this hypothesized difference between raising and control is that it immediately accounts for the transmission to the raising pivot of the quirky case assigned to the raising target by the embedded verb in languages like Icelandic (see Sag et al. (1992)). However, the Russian data presented in a recent paper (Perlmutter and Moore (2002)) seem to call this analysis into question. In Russian, the case marking of the raising target and raising pivot does not seem to be shared, contra the standard Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar analysis (henceforth, HPSG). In this paper, we show that the phenomena described by Perlmutter and Moore can receive another analysis, fully compatible with HPSG’s theory of raising. We argue in addition that our account leads to a slightly simpler model of the Russian data than Perlmutter and Moore’s. Crucially, this analysis is only available if we avail ourselves of a rich network of language-specific constructional schemata, a stance recently advocated within HPSG, following the lead of Construction Grammar (see Sag (1997), Ginzburg and Sag (2001), and Kathol (2001), among others). This is not true, though, of Categorial Grammar (e.g., Jacobson (1990) and work based on it), which aims to account for the same kinds of differences that the HPSG account focuses on.