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In:Weak Referentiality
Edited by Ana Aguilar-Guevara, Bert Le Bruyn and Joost Zwarts
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 219] 2014
► pp. 101–128

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Weak referentiality and Russian instrumental nominals

Published online: 3 December 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.219.05bog
This paper focuses on weak instrumental nominals in Russian and it shows their similarities, both from a semantic and a syntactic point of view, with bare predicates in Romance languages, namely Catalan. These nominal expressions are property-denoting expressions that show non-unique reference. We extend the analysis proposed for predicate nominals to other instrumental nominals in Russian: nominal adjuncts, cognate adjuncts, and manner cognate objects. We analyze these bare nominals as objects of an abstract function F which is postulated either subordinate to a light verb, where it projects the property-type attributed to Ninstr, or is adjoined to a verbal predicate, where it is interpreted as introducing a modification of the event predicate.
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