The Clausative-Presentative Construction in Russian and Serbian

Abstract:This paper describes the clausative-presentative construction, a particular type of the presentative construction found in Slavic languages, using data from Russian and Serbian. The discussion is carried out within the Meaning-Text linguistic approach.The clausative-presentative construction is syntactically headed by a special presentative lexeme that is a clausative (i.e., can constitute a clause by itself or together with its obligatory actants): 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, a rare occurrence.The semantic and syntactic properties of the clausative-presentative construction follow from the lexical meaning of the clausative-presentative lexeme that heads it. Therefore, this construction is a syntactic construction only in a very general sense (≈ ‘a configuration of syntactically linked items’); in fact, it is a clausative lexeme taken with its actant. This construction is compared with the cleft construction, which is a genuine syntactic construction: it expresses communicative information by a particular syntactic configuration.Lexical entries of Russian and Serbian clausative-presentative lexemes are supplied, together with an overview of their co-polysemous or homophonous lexical “partners”.