Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

Mi 28.6., 12:30-14:00: Marco Biasio (Modena & Reggio Emilia): Three Puzzles about nel’zja in Contemporary Russian

This talk seeks to provide a unified solution for three structural puzzles involving the phi-invariant operator nel’zja in negative deontic utterances in Contemporary Russian. These include: a) the deontic-anankastic mismatch assigned to imperfective infinitive forms headed, respectively, by nel’zja (Mne nel’zja vstavat’ rano ‘I must not wake up early’) and a (presumably) null modal head (Mne ne vstavat’ rano ‘I don’t have to wake up early’); b) the identity reading contextually activated with generalized, non-referential Holders (Nel’zja perevestiPF / perevodit’IPF celyj tekst ‘It is impossible / forbidden to translate the whole text’ ≈ Ne perevestiPF / perevodit’IPF celyj tekst); and c) modal-aspectual mismatches where an aspectual infinitive head is wired with a set of apparently inconsistent accessibility relations, i.e., circumstantial with IPF (instead of PF) and strong deontic with PF (instead of IPF). It will be argued that these ‘puzzles’ do not run counter any theory of semantic composition, since they can be explained via non-trivial interaction of two main parameters, i.e., on the one hand, the quantificational force specified in the extended denotation of each aspectual operator and, on the other, the grammatically relevant distinction between primary and secondary ordering sources for both overt and covert modal operators. If time permits, a syntactic account of these semantic facts will be accordingly provided.