Bringing about consequence accusatives: A semantically non -vacuous approach

This dissertation examines a specific type of construction which has long been erroneously identified as a subjectless or Agentless sentence. This study aims to demonstrate that the construction under consideration is an active sentence with a transitive verb, the argument structure of which is fully realized. The construction under consideration overtly and obligatorily consists of a transitive verb and an accusative NP, the internal argument of the verb. Due to the apparent lack of an external argument, it previously has been assumed to have either a null expletive or a degenerated argument structure. Based on empirical as well as theoretical grounds, such analyses are challenged herein: the theoretical assumptions which inevitably arise in the expletive analysis and the EPP-oriented A-movement analysis are proven to be incompatible with Russian facts; data with regard to the occurrence as infinitivals of the construction at issue strongly suggest the presence of a covert subject with semantic content as the controller of PRO. Drawing from parallel behaviors between the construction at issue and the "arbitrary plural" construction, which also lacks an overt subject and only differs by its verbal morphology in appearance, this study argues in favor of the presence of the same type of covert subjects in the two constructions and thus eliminates the necessity of positing an additional class of deviant constructions in Russian. The covert subject at issue is identified as a pronominal variable dependent on [+Tense] of TP for determining its value. Given the reference and uninterpretable Tense feature of the covert pronominal variable subject, the peculiarity of semantic and syntactic properties of the construction under consideration vanishes; the semantic and syntactic properties of the construction under consideration follow in a straightforward manner. Without stipulating a null expletive, which fails to account for the relevant data, not to mention the accompanying ad hoc morphosyntactic restrictions, nor the degenerated argument structure against the general insight, this study successfully expounds the derivation of the construction under consideration as that of an active sentence whose predicate is transitive. The findings of this study proposition the possibility of accounting for impersonal constructions which have presented challenges in previous analyses.