Agent prominence and movement in Russian third person plural impersonals (“indefinite-personal sentences”)
Schlagworte:
agentivity, linguistic prominence, verbs of motion, volition, sentienceAbstract
The present paper reports the results of an acceptability judgement test designed to test two hypotheses: first, that the Russian 3pl impersonal construction is affected by agent prominence, i.e. verbs implying a more prominent agent are more acceptable than verbs implying an agent with fewer agentivity features; second, that movement as an agentivity feature should be conceptualized as a gradual category, thus making a fast-moving referent a more prominent agent than one moving slowly. The former hypothesis could be verified, the latter falsified.
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