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Description
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The Russian verb gruzit’ ‘load’ is special for three reasons. First, this verb has two syntactic constructions it can appear in, second it has three Natural Perfectives, and third all three Natural Perfectives can also use both constructions. The two constructions that gruzit’ ‘load’ can appear in are called the “theme-object” construction and the “goal-object” construction. The names of the constructions come from the direct object that is marked with the accusative case. Let’s say that we have some boxes that we want to transport and a cart that we can use for this purpose. The boxes are the theme (the item that is put somewhere) and the cart is the goal (the place where the item is put). In the theme-object construction the theme is the direct object, as in грузить/gruzit’ ящики на телегу ‘load the boxes onto the cart’. The goal appears in a prepositional phrase in the theme-object construction, usually with the preposition на ‘onto’ or в ‘into’. In the goal-object construction the goal is the direct object, as in грузить/gruzit’ телегу ящиками ‘load the cart with boxes’. The theme in the goal-object construction often appears in the instrumental case as in our example: ящиками ‘with boxes’. Грузить/gruzit’ ‘load’ uses not just one, but three prefixes to form Natural Perfectives: na-, za-, and po-. Collectively we call these four verbs (the simplex and the three Natural Perfectives) “the ‘load’ verbs”. All three Natural Perfectives can appear in both the theme-object and the goal-object constructions. Chapter 4 explores whether the choice of prefix makes a difference in the distribution of the theme-object and goal-object constructions. The database: There are 1920 lines of data, each corresponding to one of the examples extracted from the Russian National Corpus. This file does not contain the actual examples, but rather just the relevant data on each variable for each example. If you open the .csv file, you will see that there are four columns, corresponding to our four variables: CONSTRUCTION: This is our dependent variable, and it has two values, theme, and goal. VERB: This is an independent variable, and it has four values, _zero (for the unprefixed verb грузить|gruzit’ ‘load’), na, za, and po (for the three prefixed variants). REDUCED: This is an independent variable, and it has two values, yes and no. This refers to whether the construction was reduced (yes) or full (no). PARTICIPLE: This is an independent variable, and it has two values, yes and no. This refers to whether the construction was passive (yes) or active (no). |
