Abstract
Based on the data from the Russian National Corpus, the paper studies Russian wh-exclamatives with and without predicates. Firstly, it lists wh-exclamatives with each of the following eight wh-words: do čego, kak, kakoj, kakov, naskol’ko, skol’, skol’ko, čto za. Secondly, on the basis of the corpus frequencies of the established wh-exclamatives, it shows that those wh-exclamatives that involve NPs predominantly occur without predicates, whereas those wh-exclamatives that do not involve NPs predominantly occur with predicates. Thirdly, the paper reveals that without-predicates wh-exclamatives are mostly nominative marked and their most frequent type, kakoj-exclamatives, involves either a scalar adjective or a scalar noun, if an NP lacks an adjective. Last but not least, the paper demonstrates which wh-constructions function only as exclamatives.
Аннотация
Статья посвящена исследованию бессказуемостных и сказуемостных восклицательных конструкций, которое проведено на материале Национального корпуса русского языка. Анализируются восклицательные конструкции со следующими вопросительными словами (wh-words): до чего, как, какой, каков, насколько, сколь, сколько, что за. На основании частотности восклицательных конструкций с этими местоимениями сделаны следующие выводы: восклицательные конструкции с именными группами преимущественно бессказуемостные, в то время как восклицательные конструкции без именных групп преимущественно сказуемостные. Кроме того, именные группы в бессказуемостных восклицательных конструкциях преимущественно маркированы именительным падежом, a их наиболее частотная разновидность—восклицательные конструкции с местоимением какой—содержит градуальное прилагательное или градуальное существительное. Наконец, в статье показано, какие конструкции с местоимениями являются собственно восклицательными конструкциями.
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Notes
Another paper that studies reduced wh-exclamatives is Munaro (2006) in which constructions like (i) are analysed in the Romance languages:
-
(i)
Noioso, il tuo amico! (Italian)
lit. ‘Boring, your friend!’
However, this type of reduced wh-exclamative is syntactically quite different from what has been observed in English and what we see in Russian. As Munaro (2006, p. 186) stated, “[i]t is a kind of reduced clause where the missing verb is interpreted as a silent copula; the predicative complement linearly precedes the subject and is separated from it by a slight intonational break, rendered graphically by means of a comma”. See also Vinet (1991) for French.
-
(i)
Remarkably, Russian has a null present form of the predicate byt’ ‘be’ when it functions as a copula. This means that sentences with copulas like (ii) represent wh-exclamatives with predicates. Importantly, the past and future forms of the copula are not null (for abbreviations please cf. fn. 6):
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(ii)
Kak
on
{Ø / byl / budet}
interesen!
how
he
{prs / pst / fut}
interesting.brief
‘How interesting he {is / was / will be}!’
-
(ii)
All the examples taken from the RNC have a special label ‘(RNC)’. There are few examples which were constructed by us as Russian native speakers. Such examples do not have any label.
Presumably, the simultaneous application of these two rules are redundant but that was our initial search query and we decided to leave it as it is in order to escape a potential misrepresentation of the examples found.
Some of the queries are not identical to this general one; however, all the queries were provided by the Main corpus of the RNC and date back to February–July 2017. Some queries have more specific time intervals: February–March 2017 (see fn. 15) and July 2017 (see fn. 17).
The following abbreviations have been used in this paper: adv—adverb, brief—brief form of an adjective, comp—comparative, dat—dative, fut—future tense, gen—genitive, inf—infinitive, ins—instrumental, loc—locative, pred—predicative, prs—present tense, pst—past tense, sg—singular, subj—subjunctive; AP—adjective phrase, AdvP—adverb phrase, NP—noun phrase, PredP—predicative phrase, VP—verb phrase.
We use the same abbreviations as in Siemund (2015): NP for noun phrases without adjectives and APNP for noun phrases with adjectives (i.e., adjective in an attributive position).
Importantly, since Russian is a free word order language, the elements of each construction do not necessarily follow each other in the order specified here. The curly brackets indicate that two constructions are possible; here: (a) kakoj + NP + copula + NP or (b) kakoj + NP + copula + full form of an AP.
According to Sičinava (2011) among many others, mnogo and malo are syntactically numeric (cf. also skol’ko). Like numerals, they require a nominal argument in the genitive case.
As we discuss later, there are combinations of kak + VP. However, kak does not modify a VP here but an elided AdvP.
Here, we leave aside numeric constructions kak + {mnogo / malo}.
However, not all predicatives end with the o-element, cf. len’ ‘be lazy’, ne po silam ‘above one’s strength, beyond one’s power(s)’.
It seems that, unlike kak, skol’ (and also naskol’ko, do čego—see for them below) modify a VP rather than an elided AdvP. Presumably, the original constructions for all of them were as follows: skol’, naskol’ko and do čego modified the adverb sil’no ‘strongly’ (lit.) but synchronically, recovering sil’no does not seem to take place.
Here, unlike kakoj or čto za, do čego modifies an AP within an NP, not a whole NP. The evidence comes from the fact that an elided adjective makes the sentence ungrammatical: cf. *Do čego talanty! vs. (26). However, we found quite a few examples such as Do čego krasavica! ‘How beautiful she is!’ (lit. how + noun) but they seem to be marginal and resemble quite odd uses of the analytic comparative item bolee (cf. (iii)), which typically modifies a comparative form of an AP, AdvP or PredP.
-
(iii)
-
(iii)
The results for this query were obtained in February–March 2017.
Here, the data are raw, that is, they may contain irrelevant data (e.g., some sentences might end with “?!”).
The results for this query were obtained in July 2017.
Interestingly, the genitive and instrumental are usually used in idiomatic expressions: e.g., Kakogo djavola! (gen) ‘Damn!’, Kakimi sud’bami! (ins) ‘How did you get here?’.
As in the case of kakoj + APNP exclamatives, we did not search for the split constructions skol’ko + N + A.
As for {kak mnogo / kak malo} + (AP)NP exclamatives, the analogous search queries provided small amounts of constructions (less than 10 for each cell from Table 6). There is no clear picture of whether exclamatives with predicates are less frequent than exclamatives without predicates.
The queries were as follows: a wh-word with a capital letter (capital), as the first word in a sentence (first) at a distance of 1 word to a noun (S) before the exclamation mark (bexcl).
APs are participles which are marked up as VPs in the RNC. As for AdvPs, despite the fact that a verb follows do čego, in some cases, it modifies the AdvP which precedes it.
Table 8 presents raw data.
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The study was supported by the Russian Science Foundation, grant No. 18-78-10128.
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Vishenkova, A., Zevakhina, N. Wh-exclamatives with and without predicates in Russian. Russ Linguist 43, 107–125 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-019-09213-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-019-09213-x