THE SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS OF THE RUSSIAN INFINITIVE (SUBJECTS, DATIVE CASE, SECOND, CONTROL, BINDING)

The modern Russian infinitive appears in many different syntactic constructions and, therefore, displays a variety of properties to be explained. The two main goals of this dissertation are: (i) to give a detailed description of the syntactic and semantic properties of the infinitive, and (ii) to provide a unified analysis accounting for these properties in manner consistent with facts from other areas of Russian grammar.;The final chapter deals with the theoretical significance of the infinitive's properties. It is suggested that an analysis most consistent with the data is one that provides for the existence of dative subjects within infinitive phrases, a possibility not consistent with the principles of Government and Binding theory as currently formulated. The analysis presented is conducted in a categorial-type framework that contains an autonomous morphological component and an enriched logical form component. By defining grammatical relations in terms of logical form, it is able to characterize oblique subjects and nominative objects, and claims that both exist in Russian. It proposes that all Russian infinitive phrases have sentential structure, i.e. neither S' nor VP(') but S, and contain a dative NP subject, even if it is phonologically null. Another claim is that infinitive phrases can appear as subjects only under very limited conditions. It is also shown that such an analysis can be integrated into a grammar of Russian that accounts for other constructions and phenomena, such as existential sentences, the genitive of negation, and "backward" verb agreement.;The first chapter introduces the Russian infinitive, and describes its historical evolution, and its treatment in both classical Russian linguistic literature, and modern transformational work. Further, it sets forth the structure of the rest of the dissertation. Chapter two describes the different definitions of the notion "subject" in Russian and defines the terms to be used in the following chapters. Chapters 3-6 describe the infinitival constructions: (3) infinitive complements; (4) infinitives in complementizer clauses; (5) independent predicative infinitives; and (6) infinitives as subjects.