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29/01/03 Stative nominalizations 1

Stative predicates in Russian and their nominalizations Andrew Spencer Marina Zaretskaya ABSTRACT

1. INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................................................. 2

2. TYPES OF STATIVE PREDICATE................................................................................................ 3

3. TYPES OF NOMINALIZATION..................................................................................................... 6

4. PRELIMINARY TYPOLOGY OF STATIVE VERBS.................................................................. 8

4.1 VERBS OF INHERENT PROPERTY........................................................................................................... 8 4.2 RELATION BETWEEN FACTS/EVENTS.................................................................................................... 9 4.3 RELATIONS BETWEEN OBJECTS............................................................................................................ 9 4.4 SEMIOTIC RELATION.......................................................................................................................... 11 4.5 SPATIAL CONFIGURATION.................................................................................................................. 11 4.6 PROPERTIES OF A CLASS .................................................................................................................... 14 4.7 PERCEIVED STATES ........................................................................................................................... 14 4.8 PHYSICAL STATES ............................................................................................................................. 17 4.9 MODAL STATES................................................................................................................................. 18 4.10 VERBS OF DOMINATION................................................................................................................... 19 4.11 VERBS OF EXISTENCE AND PRESENCE.............................................................................................. 20 4.12 PSYCHOLOGICAL STATES ................................................................................................................ 20

5. CONCLUSIONS: STATIVE VERBS AND NOMINALIZATIONS........................................... 22

6. DERIVED STATIVES..................................................................................................................... 23

6.1 DERIVED GENERICS ........................................................................................................................... 23 6.2 LEXICALLY DERIVED HABITUALS - OCCUPATIONS AND BEHAVIOURS............................................... 25

7. CONCLUSIONS............................................................................................................................... 32

8. REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................. 33

9. APPENDIX 1 .................................................................................................................................... 34

10............................................................................................................................................................ 44


Abstract We investigate the deverbal nominalizations licensed by stative predicates in Russian. Russian has a wide variety of stative types, including a number absent in English. Basing ourselves on the typologies proposed by Bulygina (1982) and Paduèeva (1996) we show that only a limited number of subtypes regularly permit nominalizations. These are verbs of Existence and Psychological State verbs. With other types a nominalization appears to be rare or impossible. We conclude with discussion of two derived stative types identified by Paduèeva (1996), Occupations (Zanjatija) and Behaviours (Povedenija). These are unusual in that some of them have a purely generic meaning and cannot be used in a properly eventive, episodic sense. The majority of these are themselves derived from nouns. We argue that it is these verbs, and not individual-level predicates in general, that can properly be called ‘inherent generics’ in the sense of Chierchia (1995).

1. Introduction The study of the aspectual dimension of lexical semantics has been of interest to students of language since at least the time of Aristotle, but it has recently taken pride of place in theoretical discussion. In Western linguistics a leading influence has been the work of Vendler (1967) who resuscitated an Aristotelian tradition of aspectual analysis. As a result it is now commonplace to distinguish telic situations from atelic situations. The telic situations are those situations which have or imply an endpoint. Vendler defined Achievements as those situations in which an end point is reached instantaneously, as in find the keys. These situations are distinguished from Accomplishments, in which the end point is the result of gradual accretion by prior Activity, for instance build a house or eat the sandwich. Other types of situation are atelic and do not include a delimiting endpoint. First there are Activities such as run (around in the park). The Activities, Accomplishments and Achievements all involve a situation which evolves over time, the dynamic or episodic situations (sometimes also called ‘eventive’). These are to be contrasted with States, which do not involve any evolution over time but just are. In addition, it is often said that dynamic situations but not states, have to be “subject to a new input of energy” to maintain them Comrie 1976:49). Examples of States in English include verbs such as exist, cover as in snow covers the fields and Psychological State predicates such as know or love. In addition, adjectives generally denote States (be tired, be intelligent).

The aspectual class to which a predicate belongs is generally taken to be part of its lexical

semantic representation, whether as a primitive or as a derived category, determined by other components of the semantic representation. In addition, many authors have implicated aspectual class membership with a variety of phenomena relating to the expression of argument structure (e.g. Tenny 1994).

In the Russian linguistic tradition the problem of the aspectual determinants of lexical

semantics has been put into focus over the past century by the awareness of the role of grammatical aspect in Slavic languages. The aspectual dimension is partially grammaticalized (or for some, lexicalized) in that Slavic verbs distinguish two forms, the perfective and the imperfective. A perfective verb, broadly speaking, denotes a telic situation, while an imperfective verb denotes an atelic situation (for instance, a progressive or continuous aspect, the iteration of a series of telic situations, or the existence of a state). Grammatical aspect interacts in complex ways with lexical semantics, and the key role of lexical semantics in the properties of grammatical aspect has meant that Russian linguistics has always accorded considerable importance to the situation types denoted by verb predicates. Thus, as stressed by Paduèeva (1996), many of the findings of Vendler (which was originally published in 1957) were anticipated by the work of the distinguished Russian aspectologist, Ju. S. Maslov (1948 and many subsequent works).

Much discussion has been devoted to the nature of dynamic predicates and their semantic and

grammatical properties in recent theoretical discussion. Rather less attention has been paid to stative predicates in the recent literature, though older works, and handbooks of English and other languages often provide reasonably detailed discussion (e.g Jesperson 1992). Thus, there have been relatively few attempts to identify different types of stative predicate and establish the relationships, if any, between


subtypes and between statives and other situation types (Mufwene, 1984, being something of an exception). A good survey of contemporary assumptions is given by Smith (1991).

Any investigation of stativity in the lexicon of a language will have to take a stand on such

issues. Some of the questions are discussed in Spencer (1998) and a number are raised in connection with the existence of a stative ‘middle’ construction in Russian in Spencer and Zaretskaya (1998). We will touch upon them in our discussion of Occupations and Behaviours in section 6.

There is a fair variety of verb types in Russian which deserve the label ‘stative’. We will

follow most closely the typological descriptions found in Bulygina (1982) and in Paduèeva (1996, especially Ch. 8). Our strategy is to make as many fine distinctions as seems appropriate, so as to ensure that we don’t miss any small islands of systematic behaviour. This isn’t to imply that we are able to attach any deeper theoretical significance to our typology, merely that it provides a useful analytic and descriptive framework.

Having presented our typology in section 2. In section 3 we sketch what we mean by ‘deverbal nominalization’. The important point here is that we are asking for nominals which function as the name of the situation described by the verb. As is well-known, there are several other types of nominalization, and we will wish to distinguish those other types and set them aside. We will see that there are several ways in which nominalizations naming situations (or situation types) may be used. The core descriptive goal of the paper is addressed in section 4, in which we present the basic typology and systematically examine the kinds of situation type nominal that verbs in each class permit. The basic observation is that verbs denoting true states fail to license true nominalizations, though a number of subgroups systematically permit nominalizations, with varying degrees of regularity.

Our principal aim throughout the paper is essentially descriptive. Along the way we will outline a number of problems which strike us as important for lexical theory, without necessarily providing any solutions for those problems. However, given that this area has received rather less theoretical attention than other aspects of verbal semantics, we regard it as valuable simply to isolate certain of these theoretical problem areas and provide a reasonable explicit statement of what the problem consists in.

2. Types of stative predicate Paduèeva (1996, Ch. 8) distinguishes the following semantic classes of stative:

• permanent properties and relations (soderžat´, protivoreèit´, glasit´) • temporary states - ‘vremennye sostojanija’ (videt´, naxodit´sja) • permanent states - ‘ustojèivye sostojanija’ (znat´, ljubit´)

In addition, she identifies two closely related subclasses which share certain properties with Activities but which also exhibit properties of permanent states:

• Occupations (‘Zanjatija’ such as vorovat´, koèevat´) • Behaviours (‘Povedenija’ such as ignoririvat´, balovat´sja)

These two subclasses are dealt with separately in Spencer and Zaretskaya (1998c). The distinction between permanent and temporary states seems to correspond in large part to the distinction between individual-level and stage-level predicates. However, Paduèeva’s distinction is more finely-grained, in that she effectively partitions the individual-level predicates. The permanent properties and relations constitute one subset of the individual-level predicates, while the permanent states constitute another subset. In the literature on stative predicates some of which we shall review later it is rare for properties (or properties and relations) to be discussed separately from permanent states. Indeed, the concept ‘property’ tends to be taken for granted rather than discussed.

The main difference between the Properties and Relations on the one hand and States proper on the other is that Properties/Relations are atemporal, that is, they cannot be localized in time (cf.


Klein’s, 1995, 0-state predicates). Paduèeva adduces five tests to distinguish atemporal predications from individual-level States: Atemporal predicates cannot be used with sejèas ‘now’: (1) Paket (*sejèas) soderžit cennye dokumenty package (*now) contains valuable documents ‘The package contains valuable documents’ This test can disambiguate a verb such as xromat´ ‘to be lame, limp’: (2) a. On xromaet he lame/limps = ‘He is limping’ [stage-level State] = ‘He is lame’ [atemporal property] b. On sejèas xromaet he now limps = ‘He is limping now’ [stage-level State] ≠ ‘He is lame now’ [atemporal property] It is possible to localize even an individual-level State in time ‘abstract’ time, by using a temporal adverbial with the general sense ‘at time t, situation s held’. Thus, we can say (3) (Paduèeva 1996:133): (3) V naèale èetvertogo kursa ona uže vladela švedskim jazykom at beginning fourth year she already knew Swedish language ‘She already knew Swedish at the beginning of the fourth year’ Attempts to localize atemporal properties fail: (4) V tot moment on xromal at that moment he limped = ‘At that moment he was limping’ ≠ ‘At that moment he was lame’ The adverbial vsegda ‘always’ has two principal uses in Russian. One is as a universal quantifier over points in time, especially in the present tense. The other use is found with past and future tenses and denotes, respectively ‘there was no point at which situation s had not yet arisen’/‘there is no point at which situation s will no longer hold’. The latter interpretation is possible for individual-level States (5) but not for atemporal properties (6): (5) a. Ona vsegda znala, èto on negodjaj she always knew that he scoundrel ‘She always knew that he was a scoundrel’ b. Ona vsegda budet znat´, èto on ljubil ee she always will know that he loved her ‘She will always know that he loved her’ (6) a. Cerkov´ stojala/budet stojat´ na xolme church stood/will stand on hill ‘The church stood/will stand on the hill’ b. *Èta cerkov´ vsegda stojala/budet stojat´ na xolme this church always stood/will stand on hill Framing temporal adverbials are possible with all situation types, including individual-level States, except atemporal properties:


(7) a. Pjat´ let ja ljubil ètu devušku five years I loved that girl ‘For five years I was in love with that girl’ b. *On pjat´ let raspolagal zemelńym uèastkom he five years have.at.disposal allotment (Cf. English: ‘For five years he had an allotment at his disposal’) The tense of atemporal properties cannot be interpreted in the canonical fashion, as a deictic temporal marker. The past tense indicates that the subject of the predicate is no longer regarded as in the subjective ‘world’ of the speaker, so that (8) implies that the package no longer exists: (8) Paket soderžal cennye dokumenty package contained valuable documents ‘The package contained valuable documents’ Likewise, Džon byl kanadec ‘John was a Canadian’ implies that John is somehow no longer in the speaker’s sphere of interest (for example, he has died, or he has left the neighbourhood for good) rather than that John has been granted a different nationality. Similarly, in the present tense it is not possible to interpret Džon kanadec ‘John is a Canadian’ as meaning ‘at the present time’ or ‘John is always a Canadian’. Rather, we can perhaps think of the present tense here as simply a default tense for use when we wish to make the least number of claims about the speakers attitude to the temporal structure of the situation (though Paduèeva herself doesn’t put it this way).

Paduèeva also offers a number of tests to distinguish permanent (individual-level) States from temporary States. The tests which identify permanent States also identify atemporal properties/relations. An adverbial denoting ‘incorporated’ time can only combine with a stage-level State and not an individual-level State. The verbs love and hate are intriguing in this respect in that the former seems to be viewed as a permanent characteristic linguistically, while the latter is temporary (Paduèeva 1996:138): (9) a. V ètu minutu ona ego nenavidela at that minute she him hated ‘At that moment she hated him’ b. *V ètu minutu ona ego ljubila at that minute she him loved Adverbial quantifiers are generally incompatible with individual-level States: (10) a. On byl èasto/dva raza prav he was often/two times right ‘He was right often/twice’ b. *On byl èasto/dva raza umnym he was often/two times intelligent As one would expect, where an adverbial quantifier is possible with such a predicate it is as a quantifier over the subject, and not over eventualities as such (cf. Chierchia 1995:181, Kratzer, 1995): (11) a. Medsestra èasto znaet luèše, èem vraè nurse often knows better than doctor ‘A nurse often knows better than the doctor’ ‘Nurses often know better than the doctor’ When a stage-level State is predicated of an object-referring phrase we obtain a sentence which can be located in time and has none of the properties of a generic sentence. However, when predicated of a kind-referring term it becomes a generic:


(12) a. Voda kipit water boil.PRES ‘The water is boiling’ [non-generic] b. Voda kipit pri 100° water boil.PRES at 100° ‘Water boils at 100°’ [generic] No such difference is observed with individual-level predicates: (13) a. On znaet, èto volki opasny he knows that wolves dangerous ‘He knows that wolves are dangerous’ b. Každyj znaet, èto volki opasny each knows that wolves dangerous ‘Everyone knows that wolves are dangerous’ This is one of the reasons why individual-level predicates are said to be a type of generic predication. Chierchia (1995) has argued that all individual-level predicates are indeed inherently generic predicates. The fourth test uses ‘intensive’ durational adverbs of the kind ‘all day’, which require the eventuality to evolve during the interval denoted by the adverb. Thus, we can say (14) but not (15): (14) Vse svoje detstvo bolel all his childhood was.ill ‘He was ill throughout the whole of his childhood’ (15) *Vse svoje detstvo ona znala nemeckij jazyk, a potom zabyla all his childhood she knew German language and then forgot

3. Types of nominalization The nominalization types which will interest us here are specifically those nominalizations which can be regarded as names of situation types. These are often called ‘action nominals’ or ‘process nominals’ when referring to dynamic situation types. Grimshaw (1990) refers to them as ‘complex event nominals’, a term which has the disadvantage of suggesting that verbs themselves can denote complex or simplex events and that the nominalizations are names of the latter. For present purposes we will refer to such nominals as using the cumbersome but descriptive ‘names of situation types’ (or just ‘situation type nominal’). In its purest form this type of nominalization is a transposition, that is, the denotation of the nominal is essentially the denotation of the verb and all that effectively changes is the syntactic category.

Situation type nominalizations are to be distinguished from those deverbal nominals which denote objects (abstract or concrete). Such nominals are not transpositions but fully-fledged lexical derivations which create novel lexemes. Thus, ‘shavings’ only denotes the bits of material which result from shaving activity. The noun ‘appliance’, though morphologically derived from ‘apply’ has no synchronic semantic connection with this verb, and only denotes a machine. The noun ‘delivery’ can denote the thing delivered (as in Today’s delivery (of iron ore) weighed three tons). Collectively such nominals are usually referred to as ‘result nominalizations’, because the commonest meaning is ‘(concrete or abstract) result of the given verb’. However, as with delivery, the notion of ‘result’ sometimes has to interpreted rather loosely.

As Grimshaw (1990) stresses, a deverbal nominal may denote an event without naming a situation type. Thus, in There were three deliveries today we are naming delivery events, rather than


objects delivered. However, we are not naming the situation type. Such event names are called ‘simple event nominals’ by Grimshaw (1990). One of the characteristic features of result nominals and ‘simple event’ nominals which distinguishes them from situation type nominalizations proper is that the result and simple event nouns have denotations which are perceived as objects ontologically (at some level of abstraction) and which can therefore be counted and hence pluralized. A true situation type nominal cannot be pluralized. Grimshaw (1990) discusses a number of other types of distinguishing behaviour. The term ‘event noun’ would be ambiguous between a situation type nominalization corresponding to a verb denoting an event (as opposed to a state) and a nominalization such as delivery, so we will adopt Grimshaw’s term for the latter type and called them ‘simple event nouns’.

Among the nominals which denote events (simple or otherwise) at least three semantic subtypes can be distinguished (cf. Koptjevskaja-Tamm, 1993, Vendler 1967, Zucchi, 1993):

• Names of situation types (names of states, actions, activities and so on) • Factive nominals - ‘the fact that P(x)’ • Manner nominals - ‘the manner in which P(x)’

These can be illustrated as follows for the situation type nominal from play: (22) Harriet’s playing of the ‘Appassionata’ (began at 7.30) [name of situation type] (23) Harriet’s playing of the ‘Appassionata’ (was an unexpected addition to the recital program) [factive] (24) Harriet’s playing of the ‘Appassionata’ was vigorous but controlled [manner] The noun performance can often function as a situation type nominal from perform, though more often than not it would be used as a simple event nominal, and hence can appear in the plural: Harriet’s performances of the ‘Appassionata’ are always vigorous but controlled. Simple event nominals, in general, also admit the three-way interpretations as names, facts or manners: (25) Harriet’s performances of the ‘Appassionata’ (always begin at 7.30) [name of event] (26) Harriet’s performances of the ‘Appassionata’ (were an unexpected addition to the recital

program) [factive] (27) Harriet’s performances of the ‘Appassionata’ was vigorous but controlled [manner] Finally, we note that a three way division applies equally to deadjectival, property nominalizations, which can either name the property, denote the fact that the property holds or denote the degree to which the property holds, as illustrated in (28-30): (28) Harriet displayed considerable bravery [name of property] (29) Harriet’s bravery led to a commendation [fact] (30) Harriet’s bravery exceeded anyone else’s [degree, extent]

We will regard a nominal as a nominalization of a verb if it retains the basic lexical meaning of the verb and can be interpreted with one of the three readings outlined above for nominalizations. It seems that even where stative verbs do give nominalizations, they tend to be of the factive kind. Although a number of authors have drawn attention to these distinctions (one might mention particularly Vendler’s (1967) original studies, and the detail discussion in Zucchi, 1993), there has been comparatively little general theoretical research on the exact relationship between the


interpretation of the nominal and the semantics of the original verb. Consequently, we have not been able to investigate these interpretative questions in any detail, though this would certainly be an interesting line of future inquiry.

4. Preliminary typology of stative verbs We distinguish the following subgroups of statives1: Properties/Relations:

1. Verbs of inherent property (including disposition) (kusat´sja, xromat´) 2. Relation between facts/events (zaviset´, protivoreèit´) 3. Relations between objects (otlièat´sja, sostojat´) 4. Semiotic relations (izobražat´, oboznaèat´) 5. Spatial configuration (granièit´, sosedstvovat´) 6. Properties of a class (vodit´sja, vstreèat´sja)

States

7. Perceived States (alet´, torèat´) 8. Physical States (bolet´, merznut´, pustovat´) 9. Modal States (nadležat´, predstojat´) 10. Verbs of domination (gospodstvovat´, preobladat´) 11. Verbs of existence and presence (sušèestvovat´) 12. Psychological States:

12.1. emotions (ljubit´, volnovat´sja) 12.2. mental States (soznavat´, pomnit´) 12.3. verbs of desire (xotet´, voždelet´) 12.4. verbs of intention (planirovat´, pretendovat´)

It might be thought that verbs of sound emission (burlit´, zavyvat´) and light emission (blestet´, mercat´) should be considered as States, but we follow Paduèeva (1996:142) and many others in regarding these as processes. In such verbs a certain degree of ‘energy’ is always needed in order to initiate and maintain the process, although the source of such energy is often implicit. Being processual verbs, they generally have nominalizations. However, we note Paduèeva’s (1996:142) observation that it can sometimes be hard to distinguish such predicates from genuine statives (for example cvesti, kolosit´sja).

A list of the verbs in each group in our database is provided in the Appendix. We now discuss each of these subgroups in turn.

4.1 Verbs of inherent property These verbs describe a property and correspond to an adjective from which can be derived a deadjectival property nominalization (except vit´sja, zavivat´sja ‘wind round’ which has no special adjective and uses the present active participle of the verb instead, byt´ v´jušèimsja ): (31)

bodat´sja ‘butt’ byt´ bodlivym bodlivost´ kartavit´ ‘burr’ byt´ kartavym kartavost´ skripet´ ‘squeak’ byt´ skripuèim skripuèest´ xromat´ ‘limp, be lame byt´ xromym xromota kosit´ ‘squint’ byt´ kosym kosina

1 A helfpul summary of the general behaviour of stative predicates in Russian is found in Miller (1970).


As Paduèeva (1996:132) points out the verb xromat´ ‘be lame, limp’ is ambiguous between an individual-level and stage-level reading, and she points out that the two readings behave differently with respect to process sensitive to the temporal structure of situations. Thus, on the stage-level reading it is possible to form an inceptive zaxromat´, as in Kon´ zaxromal ‘The horse started limping’. It is impossible to use such an inceptive with the individual-level reading, cf. *Posle e/togo kon´ zaxromal with the intended reading ‘After that the horse developed a permanent limp/went lame’. An inceptive of the individual-level reading has to be expressed analytically: On stal xromat´ ‘He started limping, he developed a limp’. As a stage-level predicate xromat´ is presumably a manner of motion verb: On xromal po komnate ‘He limped around the room’.

The verb reagirovat´ ‘react with’ has the nominalization reagirovanie, but this is only possible as a nominalization of the verb in its dynamic sense. Thus, reagirovanie (kisloty s metallom) ‘the reaction of acid with metal’ can only refer to an event, not a property of the acid, which would have to expressed analytically as sposobnost´ kisloty reagirovat´ s metallom ‘the capacity of the acid to react with metal’ or some such.

We conclude that nominalizations from this subclass of verbs are not possible.

4.2 Relation between facts/events This subgroup is closely related semantically to predicates of semiotic relation (section 4.2). Many of them seem to be derived from (or at least related to) dynamic verbs (often with human agents) such as ukazat´ ‘point to’ or protivoreèit´ ‘contradict’. In their dynamic senses such verbs often give nominalizations, of course. (32)

podtverždat´ v podtverždenie ‘confirm’ in confirmation of predšestvovat´ predšestvie ‘precede’ ‘precedence’ predvešèat´ ?predvešèanie (grozy), predvesté ‘portend’ portent (of thunder) udostoverjat´ v udostoverenie ‘assure’ in assurance/confirmation of ukazyvat´ (na) ukazanie (na) ‘point, refer (to) ‘reference (to)’

All but predšestvie seem to be related to dynamic verbs (of speaking or the equivalent), and

the nominalizations do not really have stative sense. The nominal predšestvie is sufficiently rare to be missing from MAS. We therefore conclude that this group lacks nominalizations.

4.3 Relations between objects (33)

obladat´ (svojstvom) obladanie (svojstvom) ‘possess (a property)’ ‘possession (of a property)’ otnosit´sja otnošenie ‘relate to’ ‘relation’ prinadležat´ prinadležnost´ (dannoj vešèi dannomu èeloveku) ‘belong’ ‘appurtenance proisxodit´ proisxoždenie (èeloveka ot obez´jany) ‘originate from’ ‘the origin (of man from apes)’ sootvetstvovat´ sootvetstvie (politiki novym uslovijam) ‘correspond’ ‘correspondence (of the policy to the new situation)’ vxodit´ (v sostav) ego vxoždenie (v sostav pravitel´stva)


‘enter into’ ‘his entering (into the makeup of the government)’, i.e. ‘his membership of the government’

There are some 30 examples in our database in this group, of which 6 have nominalizations:

obladanie (svojstvom), otnošenie, prinadležnost´, proisxoždenie, sootvetstvie, voždenie. Admittedly, the last, vxoždenie, is derived ultimately from a verb of motion, but then on the other hand verbs such as umešèat´sja are derived from Accomplishment verbs, yet they do not yield nominalizations in their stative sense.

This group has a certain affinity to the group of verbs of spatial configuration and position (see subsection 4.5, which also shows a greater tendency to allow nominalizations. It is not clear why it is that the group shows such equivocal behaviour, and why it neither bans nominals entirely, nor allows the majority of its members to have nominalizations. On the other hand, six in such a small group is rather a large proportion of exceptions. We have been unable to detect any semantic component in the six which have nominals which would distinguish them from their neighbours. For instance, what is it about obladat´ ‘possess’ which could distinguish it from imet´ ‘have’?

We leave the status of the counterexamples in this subgroup as a puzzle for future research.


4.4 Semiotic relation This group is represented by verbs denoting the expression of a meaning such as vyražat´, glasit´, izobražat´, in which the subject is the signifier and the object is the signified. It is a small group, and shows no evidence whatever of nominalizations. Note, however, that the nominals izobraženie, javlenie, oboznaèenie, predstavlenie, vyraženie do exist, but they do not name the States indicated in our table. Thus, vyraženie can be used as in (35b) but cannot be used as in (35a) to nominalize (34): (34) Ee lico vyražaet radost´ her face expresses joy ‘Her face expresses joy’ (35) a. *vyraženie radosti (ee licom) expression of.joy (by her face) b. vyraženie radosti (na ee lice) expression of.joy (on her face) ‘the expression of joy (on her face)’ The nominals izobraženie and vyraženie also correspond to transitive agentive verbs (‘The artist depicts a winter forest’, ‘The poet expresses his love of nature’), but these are irrelevant to our analysis, of course.

4.5 Spatial configuration These are predicates which denote spatial position of an immobile (often geographical) object in space relatively to some other object. They are similar to verbs of existence in permitting nominalizations in a number of cases. Thus, the meaning of protekat´ ‘flow’ in Cherez naš gorod protekaet reka ‘A river flows through our town’ or Kogda-to v ètom meste protekala reka ‘At one time in this place there flowed a river’ combines three ideas: existence, location and movement as the mode of existence of a river.

At first sight it would appear that the group as a whole licenses nominalizations, but with many gaps. However, certain of the gaps are systematic. Thus, the verbs of body position ležat´ ‘lie’, stojat´ ‘stand’ only give nominalizations when they refer to human beings and can be interpreted as Activities: (36) a. Sredi xolmov ležalo ozero between hills lay lake ‘Between the hills there lay a lake’ b. *ležanie ozera sredi xolmov lying of.lake between hills


(37) a. On celymi dnjami ležal na divane he whole days lay on sofa ‘He lay on the sofa for days on end’ b. ego ležanie na divane his lying on sofa ‘his lying on the sofa’ (38) a. Na pole bitvy ležali trupy on field of.battle lay corpses ‘Corpses lay on the battlefield’ b. *ležanie trupov na pole bitvy lying of.corpses on field of.battle (39) a. Na gore stojala cerkov´ on hillside stood church ‘On the hillside there stood a church’ b. *stojanie cerkvi na gore standing of church on hillside (40) a. Nišèie stojat u cerkvi beggars stand by church ‘Beggars are standing by the church’ b. stojanie nišèix u cerkvi standing of.beggars by church ‘the standing of the beggars by the church’ It is precisely when the maintenance of the body posture requires the input of energy or is ‘controlled’ (Bulygina 1982:21) that a nominalization is possible, and so we follow Bulygina, Paduèeva and many others in distinguishing between the two uses of this class of verbs. When the verb denotes a ‘true’ State, no nominalization is found. An interesting contrast here is that between ležat´ ‘lie’ with an animate subject and with the subject trup ‘dead body, corpse’, as in (37, 38). This means that Ivan ležal na divane ‘Ivan lay on the sofa’ is ambiguous between readings in which Ivan is alive or dead, and only on the former reading is a nominalization licensed. In this respect verbs of position line up with other groups such as physical State or relation between physical objects.

It is not clear why some verbs of geographical location produce nominalizations and others with very similar meaning do not. Compare (41, 42), based on the same verb root but with different prefixes: (41) a. Butylki razmestilis´ v podvale bottles were.accommodated in cellar ‘The bottles were put into the cellar’ b. razmešèenie butylok v podvale accommodating of.bottles in cellar ‘the putting of the bottles in the cellar’ (42) a. Butylki pomestilis´ v podvale bottles were.fitted into cellar ‘The bottles were fitted into the cellar’ b. *pomešèenie butylok v podvale fitting of.bottles into cellar


It is just possible that the nominalization pomešèenie is ruled out because the word has a concrete result interpretation, ‘a room’.

A further puzzling pair is shown in (43, 44): (43) a. Rajon primykaet k granice region adjoins onto border ‘The region is on the border’ b. primykanie rajona k granice adjoining of.region to border ‘the region’s being next to the border’ (44) a. Rajon granièit s Ukrainoj region borders with Ukraine ‘The region borders on the Ukraine’ b. *granièené rajona s Ukrainoj bordering of.region with Ukraine In the case of sosedstvovat´ ‘be neighbour’ the marginal nominalization ?sosedstvovanie may be ruled out because the verb is itself derived from a noun, sosedstvo, and this effectively serves as the nominalization (this would be a classic case of Blocking in the sense of Aronoff, 1976). A number of stative verbs ending in -stvovat´ behave in a similar way: nalièestvovat´ ‘be present’, nalièie, *nalièestvovanie; otsutstvovat´ ‘be absent’ otsutstvie, ?otsutstvovanie; prisutstvovat´ ‘be present’ prisutstvie, *prisutstvovanie; svidetel´stvovat´ ‘bear witness to’ svidetel´stvo, ?svidetel´stvovanie2.

2The ban cannot be purely morphological, since a whole host of verbs in -stvovat’ denoting Occupations, Behaviours or Activities do permit nominalizations in -stvovanie (at the expense of other possible forms).


4.6 Properties of a class This subtype is exemplified by verbs such as vzimat´(sja), vodit´sja, vstreèat´sja, nasèityvat´, (Paduèeva 1996:130). An example is shown in (45): (45) E/ta poroda tigrov vstreèaetsja na Dalńem Vostoke this breed of.tigers is.encountered in Far East ‘This breed of tiger is found in the Far East’ The verb derives from the reflexive passive form of vstreèat´ ‘to meet’ (hence our literal gloss in (45)). The group fails to license nominalizations.

Paduèeva also puts preobladat´ ‘exceed’ in this class. We discuss this and similar predicates under the separate heading of verbs of domination (section 4.10).

4.7 Perceived States These are states of inanimate objects whose meaning requires that there be a human perceiver (nabljudatel´) of that state (see Paduèeva 1996:128 for discussion and references on the role of the implicit observer in the meanings of many predicates). From the semantic point of view, this subclass can be taken as a ‘core’ case of a stative predicate and many of these verbs would not be verbal predicates in other European languages but would rather be expressed solely by adjectives. In many cases the Russian stative verb is clearly deadjectival, e.g. statives deriving from colour terms such as belet´ ‘to be white’ from belyj ‘white’ and so on. Bulygina (1982:130) remarks that such predicates express a temporary (stage-level) property (cf. also Paduèeva 1996:137). Furthermore, the verbs based on colour terms and certain others seem to combine the meaning of the state ‘being of colour X’ with a presentational meaning: (31) (Na gorizonte) beleet parus odinokij on horizon is.white sail solitary ‘(On the horizon) a solitary white sail can be seen’ Thus, an example such as (31) is to be interpreted to mean ‘there is a sail (visible) on the horizon and that sail is seen to be white’. However, the nature of the semantic packaging in these verbs is such as to render them impossible to translate directly into English. The sense of presentational or locational meaning is sufficiently strong for Bulygina (1982:15, note 11) to suggest that the predicate expressing the property is effectively in the presupposition of the verb, not its assertion. It is difficult to know how to test Bulygina’s conjecture formally - such sentences are generally impossible in the negative, for instance. It is of interest, however, that on occasions the adjectival property component has to be interpreted as an individual-level predicate (as in (31)) even though the predication as a whole for this subclass has to be stage-level. Furthermore, it turns out to be very difficult to use such verbs to predicate an unusual or unexpected property of an object. Thus, it isn’t possible to predicate redness of a house whose colour is unknown in a case like (32): (32) *My povernuli za uglom i pered nami krasnel domik we turned round corner and before us be.red.PAST little.house However, where the colour is the expected one there is no problem: (33) Vnizu krasneli èerepiènye kryši Pragi beneath be.red.PAST tiled roofs of.Prague ‘Beneath us we saw the red-tiled roofs of Prague’ (34) Vnizu beleli domiki Lindosa beneath be.white.PAST little.houses of.Lindos ‘Beneath us we saw the white houses of Lindos’


(35) Vnizu želtel osenij les beneath be.yellow.PAST autumn.ADJ forest ‘Beneath us we saw a yellow autumn forest’

Perhaps a better way of thinking of these verbs is to say that they continue to predicate what is essentially an individual-level property (assuming that we accept that ‘being yellow’ is an individual-level property of a specifically autumn forest), but that the predication is presented (how?) as a stage-level psychological predicate of the implicit observer. There are several problems here which we cannot address, the principal one being, which of these components of meaning is primary: the implicit observer, stage-levelhood, or the interplay of assertion and presupposition? For instance, do we deduce that the verb implies an observer from the fact that an individual-level predication is stage-level? Or do we deduce that the individual-level property is a presupposition from the existence of an implicit observer? This is clearly an area that would repay careful further study. At present we don’t even have any suggestions to make as to how to represent these various components of meaning in a lexical entry.

Predicates expressing perceived states fail to license nominalizations which name the State denoted by the verb, ‘the state of being white’. The corresponding adjective often forms a property nominalization in the normal way. In some cases, when a verb can be interpreted as an Activity, a nominalization is possible: (36) a. Zanaveska vysovyvaetsja/vygljadyvaet iz okna curtain pokes.out/looks.out out.of window ‘The curtain is poking out of the window’ b. *vysovyvanie/vygljadyvanie zanaveski iz okna poking.out/looking.out of.curtain out.of window (37) a. Deti postojanno vysovyvajutsja/vygljadyvajut iz okna children continually poke.out/look.out out.of window ‘The children are continually leaning out of the window’


b. postojannoe vysovyvanie/vygljadyvanie (detej) iz okna continual poking.out/looking.out (of.children) out.of window ‘the children’s continual leaning out the window’ (38) a. pribrežnye vysoty gospodstvovali nad mestnost´ju coastal heights dominated over locality ‘The area was dominated by the coastal hills’ b. *gospodstvo pribrežnyx vysot nad mestnost´ju domination of.coastal heights over locality (39) a. V strane gospodstvovala voennaja diktatura in country dominated military dictatorship ‘The country was dominated by a military dictatorship’ b. gospodstvo voennoj diktatury v strane domination of.military dictatorship in country ‘the domination of the military dictatorship in the country’ This shows that the ban on nominalization cannot be purely morphological in nature.

‘Majaèit´ has two meanings: a stative meaning ‘be seen, be distinguishable against a background’. and a processual meaning ‘repeatedly appear in front of one’s eyes (of a moving object)’, making it effectively a verb of light emission. This subtle difference in meaning affects the verb’s ability to form nominalizations: the stative meaning does not admit a nominal, while the meaning of light emission does. In (40) the subject is immobile while in (41) figury refers to moving people: (40) a. Vdali majaèili makuški cerkvej in.distance were.distinguished domes of.churches ‘Church domes were visible in the distance’ b. *majaèené makušek cerkvej vdali being.distinguished of.domes of.churches in.distance (41) a. Za oknom majaèili temnye figury behind window fluttered dark figures ‘Dark figures fluttered behind the window’ b. majaèené temnyx figur za oknom fluttering of.dark figures behind window ‘the fluttering of dark figures behind the window’ We conclude that it is completely impossible to nominalize the situation type denoted by the subclass.


4.8 Physical States Physical States are similar to perceived States but are not dependent on an observer for their existence. Many such verbs are related to adjectives, for instance, bolet´, cf. bolńoj and in a number of cases could be regarded as morphologically (lexically) deadjectival: pustovat´ ‘to be empty’ from pustoj ‘empty’. In some cases the verb can also can be interpreted as an activity or a process (requiring the input of energy), in which case a nominalization is generally possible. In many cases the physical State interpretation is a metaphor derived from original activity interpretation. When the verb denotes a State no nominalization is possible (see (42, 44)): (42) a. Palec dergaet (impers.) finger twitches ‘(His/her) finger is twitching’ b. *dergané palća twitch.NOM of.finger (43) a. On dergaet nogoj he jerked leg.INSTR ‘He jerked his leg’ b. *ego dergané nogoj his jerk.NOM leg.INSTR3 (44) a. Vse telo lomaet (impers.) whole body aches ‘(someone’s) whole body aches’ b. *lomka vsego tela ache.NOM of.whole body (45) a. Oni lomajut starye steny they break old walls ‘They are breaking up the old walls’ b. lomka staryx sten break.NOM of.old walls ‘The breaking up of the old walls’

Some impersonal verbs referring to sensations of illness or discomfort in the region of a body part, such as lomit´, šèemit, give nominalizations, but these can only combine with adverbials of place and can have no arguments: (46) a. pojasnicu lomit small.of.back aches b. lomota v pojasnice pain in small.of.back c. *lomota pojasnicy It would appear that such nominals name not the state as such but rather refer to the specific pain or discomfort arising from that state. Note that ‘(a) pain (in the leg)’ does not have the same denotation as ‘the state of there being a pain in the leg’. 3 Note that the verb takes a complement in the Instrumental case, and this subcategorization restriction is respected by the nominalization, too.


Paduèeva (1996:137) includes naryvat´ (‘swell and suppurate’, Vsju nedelju u menja naryval

palec) in the list of physical States. However, unlike other physical States, it has a perfective counterpart narvat´ meaning ‘become swollen and suppurated’. The pair narvat´/naryvat´ is therefore better analysed as belonging to the type ‘telic process (pf.) vs. developing process (impf.)’ in Paduèeva’s scheme. It is therefore not surprising that naryvat´ forms a situation type nominal: (47) a. Pri naryvanii palća rekomenduetsja priložit´ aloe at swelling of.finger is.recommended aloe ‘Aloe is recommended for swelling of the finger’ Unexpectedly, the verb golodat´ (1. ‘starve’; 2. ‘fast’) gives nominalizations in both agentive and non-agentive (stative?) interpretations: (48) a. Oni golodali vo vremja vojny they starved in time of.war ‘They went hungry during the war’ b. golodanie vo vremja vojny famine in time of.war ‘Wartime famine’ (49) a. Oni golodali s cel´ju poxudet´ they fast with aim to.slim ‘They are slimming’ b. golodanie s cel´ju poxudet´ fasting with aim to.slim ‘slimming’ However, notice that golodat´ is a kind of negative activity (failure to eat regularly or sufficiently, whether by choice or not), rather than a physical state (when someone feels hungry for a long time). Feeling hungry would then be a consequence of such activity, though not, strictly speaking a necessary consequence (it is possible to suffer such famine that one no longer feels ‘hunger’ in the normal sense, indeed a symptom of chronic anorexia nervosa is loss of appetite). This would mean that golodat´ is to be distinguished from genuine statives such as byt´ golodnym or xotet´ est´.

In this semantic subclass there are two deverbal nominals which denote states, iznemoženie ‘(state of) exhaustion’, and muèenie ‘torment’. These are not counterexamples to our thesis because they derive from telic, dynamic verbs and not stative verbs, iznemoè´ ‘exhaust’ and muèit´ ‘torment’ respectively. They thus denote resultant states from change of state (in fact, causative) verbs. This is interesting, in that it shows that deverbal nominals are capable of naming states, provided the base verb itself doesn’t denote a state. Finally, the (presumably) stative verb žit´ live gives žité ‘life’ (as in soldatskoe žité ‘the soldier’s life’), though this seems to name the manner in which a soldier lives rather than a simple state.

We conclude from this that verbs of this subclass do not, in the general case, give rise to nominalizations.

4.9 Modal States Most modal meanings are commonly expressed by adjectival or auxiliary (adverbial) elements such as nužen, dolžen, objazan (obligation - adjectives), nužno, nado (obligation - adverbs), možno, vozmožno, nel´zja (possibility, capacity, permission - adverbs). However, there are a number of verbs which refer to states conveying a modal meaning (obligation, necessity and so on), including stoit´ ‘to be worth(while)’, nadležat´ ‘it is necessary to’ and so on.


This small class does not permit nominalizations, with one apparent exception. The verb nuždat´sja (v pomošèi) ‘to be in need (of help)’ has a corresponding nominal nužda (v pomošèi): (50) a. On nuždaetsja v našej pomošèi he needs in our help ‘He needs our help’ b. Ego nužda v našej pomošèi his need in our help ‘his need of our help’ (51) a. Škola nuždaetsja v xorošix uèiteljax school needs in good teachers ‘The school needs good teachers’ b. nužda školy v xorošix uèiteljax need of.school in good teachers ‘the school’s need of good teachers’ Morphologically, the verb is probably derived from the noun, but this is irrelevant to our concerns, because the noun clearly functions as the nominal corresponding to the verb, and is thus functionally a nominalization. This would appear to represent a counterexample to our basic thesis, therefore. However, on closer inspection it is clear that matters are more complex. Thus, we can say (51) but not (52): (52) a. Škola nuždaetsja v kapitalńom remonte school needs in major repairs ‘The school needs major repairs’ b. *nužda školy v kapitalńom remonte need of.school in major repairs This is puzzling until we realize that nuždat´sja generally permits the corresponding nominal nužda only when we are speaking of the needs of people (as in (50)). But in such examples we are really dealing with a different class of verb, the psychological predicate (of desire, see below, section 4.12), and, as we shall see, psychological predicates regularly give rise to nominalizations. The reason why (51b) is permissible is because the school is conceived of as the collection of people who teach and study in it, whereas in (52) ‘school’ obviously denotes the physical building.

4.10 Verbs of domination This subgroup is very small but gives evidence of nominalizations. Notice that a nominalization is regularly possible with animate (esp. human) subjects, when an activity interpretation is favoured, as in (54) (cf. also examples (38, 39)): (53) a. zdes´ vlastvuet nevežestvo here rules ignorance ‘Ignorance rules here’ b. *vlastvovanie nevežestva reign of.ignorance (54) a. zdes´ vlastvujut bankiry i kapitalisty here rule bankers and capitalists ‘Bankers and capitalists rule here’ b. vlastvovanie bankirov i kapitalistov


reign of.bankers and capitalists ‘the reign of bankers and capitalists’ Given the etymology of this subgroup, it might be as well to regard it as a type of psychological predicate (see below, section 4.12). However, thus would not explain those small numbers of instances of a nominalization with a non-animate (e.g. abstract) subject. Nor would it explain why a verb such as preobladat´ ‘exceed’, with its relatively abstract meaning should permit a nominalization when vladyèestvovat´ ‘hold sway over’, deriving ultimately from the noun vladika ‘sovereign, master’ does not permit a nominalization. (On the other hand, it’s an interesting coincidence that both obladat´ and its prefixed derivate preobladat´ license a nominalization of the same morphological kind.)

4.11 Verbs of existence and presence We give a list of verbs which can take inanimate subjects (verbs of existence with animate subjects are liable to have meanings which are confounded with a component of activity). Such verbs are different from other stative verbs in two ways:

• they require an adverbial of place • they license nominalizations

The verbs themselves may denote stage- or individual-level predications and the nominalizations, though tending to have factive interpretations, can also have nominative and, marginally, degree readings ((57) is more or less interpretable, in Russian as in English, as a gradual growth distributed over individual parts of the government machinery; strictly speaking an absence cannot grow in either language, of course): (55) Otsutstvie sredstv rasprostranjaetsja po pravitel´stvennym organam absence of.resources spreads around government organs ‘The absence of resources is spreading throughout the government machinery’ (56) Otsutstvie sredstv bol´še vsego nas bespokoit absence of.resources more of.all us worries ‘What worries us most is the absence of resources’ (57) Otsutstvie sredstv v pravitel´stvennyx organax vozrastaet absence of.resources in government organs grows ‘The absence of resources is on the increase throughout the government’

We have no explanation for why this class of verbs should so readily submit to nominalization4.

4.12 Psychological States Psychological predicates are commonly divided into four principal types which fall into two groups (though sometimes two of the types are conflated in the literature). The first group we can call the ‘causative class’, illustrated by the English verb frighten. This can be used in two ways as in (58): (58) a. The spiders frightened Tom b. Dick frightened Tom

4 We might mention one point which Paducheva (1996:130) repeats from Wierzbicka (1980:186) concerning the semantics of predicates of existence: statements of existence are not predications about the subject but about the world. This is seen when existential statements are fixed in time. Thus, an atemporal proposition such as ‘Unicorns do not exist’ can be regarded as true, while a proposition such as ‘Dinosaurs do not exist’ is odd, because it seems to require dinosaurs to be mythological creatures (we have to say something like ‘Dinosaurs no longer exist’).


c. Dick frightened Tom (with a spider) In (58) the spiders are the source of Tom’s fear, while (58b) can be interpreted as saying that Dick brought about the state of fear in Tom by means of his actions, as is made clear in (58c). Note that (58b) is actually ambiguous, in that could be that Tom is frightened of Dick (whereas in (58c) we know that it is spiders that Tom is frightened of). The case illustrated by (58a) is often called a Psychological Causative while that illustrated by (58b,c) is often called an Agentive Psychological verb or Agentive Psychological Causative (cf. Grimshaw, 1990).

There are two sorts of Psychological State verb, illustrated by (59, 60): (59) a. Tom fears spiders b. Tom loves olives (60) a. The news pleased Tom b. The news concerned Tom (=caused concern) In the fear-class the subject bears the semantic role of Experiencer of the Psychological State, while in the please-class the subject bears the semantic role of Source or Stimulus. The please-class is not very widespread in English and examples such as (60) would normally be given more idiomatic paraphrases in the passive form as Tom was pleased/concerned at/by the news. For clarity we could refer to the fear-class as Subject Experiencer Psychological States and the please-class as Object Experiencer Psychological States, however, for simplicity we will speak of the fear- and please-classes. It must be admitted that the boundary between the please-class and the class of (non-agentive) Psychological Causatives can be somewhat blurred. It is not obvious to what extent we would want to say that the news in (60a) was a ‘mere’ stimulus for Tom’s pleasure or the cause of it. Likewise, it is not always clear whether we should regard the spiders in (58a) as cause or stimulus (or both)5.

These verbs nominalize, as in (61, 62): (61) a. Tom’s fear of spiders b. Tom’s love of/for olives (62) Tom’s pleasure/concern at the news Similar verb classes can be found in Russian. In particular, there are Psychological State verbs in both the please- and the fear-class. They are illustrated in (63-65): (63) Vanja boitsja paukov Vanja fears spiders (64) Vanja ljubit masliny Vanja loves olives (65) Vanje ponravilis´ novosti Vanja.DAT pleased.PL news.PL ‘Vanja was pleased by the news’ Grimshaw (1990:120f) argues that nominalizations of the frighten-class of verbs are only possible with a result meaning or as the nominalization of an agentive causative. In this they contrast with Psychological State verbs which do permit nominalizations. Thus, if Russian is like English we should find that the Psychological State verbs, at least, should nominalize. This is broadly true, though there are certain gaps, some systematic, others idiosyncratic.

In the tables given in Appendix 1 we have divided up psychological predicates into a number of subgroups, which may show slight differences in the extent to which they allow nominalizations. However, it is clear that all verbs in this group nominalize, and many of the gaps will have to be

5 A proper explanation of this would depend on a carefully worked out theory of causation among other things. For instance, is it entities such as spiders and news items that can cause or is it only events or situations? We leave these matters aside.


assumed to be essentially accidental. We have identified two groups which systematically fail to admit nominalizations: 1. colloquial verbs: divit´sja, drejfit´, dut´sja, zlobit´sja, kipet´, kipjatit´sja, kuksit´sja, psixovat´, pološit´sja, serèat´ 2. denominal and deadjectival verbs: gorjaèit´sja, gnevat´sja, gorevat´, grustit´, konfuzit´sja, nervnièat´, peèalit´šja, panikovat´, skorbet´, skuèat´, sovestit´sja, strašit´sja, stydit´sja, toskovat´, trvožit´sja, xandrit´

Sometimes it is difficult to draw a line between Psychological States and human activities they give rise to. Many of the verbs meaning ‘to be enraged’, such as besit´sja, besnovat´sja, bezumstvovat´, bujanit´, bujstvovat´, buševat´, kipjatit´sja, gorjaèit´sja, ljutovat´, neistovstvovat´, psixovat´, are more like activities in which a certain Psychological State is expressed rather than the state itself. However, even if we were to exclude such verbs we would still be left with ample examples of nominalized Psychological States.

The nature of stativity with psychological predicates is a complex matter which we do not pretend to understand. What is clear is that it will be necessary to provide extremely detailed analyses of the precise semantics of groups of verbs before sensible conclusions can be drawn. For instance, we would want to investigate the extent to which Pesetsky’s (1995) distinction between Target of emotion and Source of emotion is valid or helpful. In addition, we would want to look carefully at the idea that psychological statives are really resultatives from Achievement verbs, as claimed by van Voorst (1993). There are a number of unclarities in van Voorst’s exposition, and we will not go into it in detail, but it seems to us promising to explore the idea that a psychological predicate denotes a resultant or ‘perfective’ state, perhaps as a generalization of the analysis given by Paduèeva of pairs such as Ja ponimaju which seems to imply Ja ponjal. How this relates to the nominalization properties is as yet obscure to us, however.

The important point is that Psychological State predicates are unusual statives in a number of respects, and it is not necessarily surprising that they behave differently with respect to nominalizations from other types of stative predicate in Russian.

5. Conclusions: stative verbs and nominalizations There are very few genuine stative verbs which have nominalizations. There are two main classes of exceptions to this generalization, verbs of configuration/existence and Psychological States. There remain a number of observations about these groups.

It is curious that nominalizations of verbs of configuration and existence tend to have a factive interpretation. Thus prisutstvie uèitelja ‘the presence of the teacher’ means ‘the fact that the teacher was present’, rather than ‘the teacher’s state of being present’. Likewise, in (66) the nominalization sosedtsvo is not the name of the state denoted by the verb sosedstvovat´ ‘to border’ (66) sosedstvo etix dvux plemen border.NOM of.these two tribes ‘the fact that these two tribes border on each other’ We can say: (67) Èti plemena davno sosedstvujut drug s drugom these tribes for.a.long.time border each with other ‘These tribes have been neighbours for a long time’ but we can’t speak of *dlitelńoe sosedstvo ‘long-lasting bordering’. Here, sosedstvo denotes a fact and doesn’t name a state, as is apparent from the gloss in (66).


A number of verbs of existence are etymologically dynamic (process) verbs which have been extended metaphorically (and semantically bleached) to verbs of existence, e.g. rasti (derevo) ‘grow (tree)’, protekat´ (reka) ‘flow (river)’, vodit´sja (ryby) (lit. ‘lead themselves (fish)’). Such verbs do not give nominalizations even with the factive meaning, though there may exist a nominalization of the original sense of the verb. Thus, the tendency for a factive nominal meaning to be attributed to a nominal from this class does not extend to such metaphorical uses. This suggests that the tendency is not governed purely by semantic considerations, but that there is an element of lexicalization.

The other major class of exceptions is provided by Psychological State predicates. It might prove appropriate to exclude one subclass here, that of Mental States. A number of verbs of this subgroup give nominalizations (e.g. podozrevat´ ‘suspect’, podozrenie ‘suspicion’, rassèityvat´ ‘rely on’ rassèet ‘reliance’ and so on. However, nearly all of these verbs seem to denote types or modes of thinking rather than Mental States as such. It might be more reasonable, then, to regard a mode of thinking as more of an Activity than a State, in which case such nominals would be irrelevant to us. However, cases such as soznat´ ‘recognize, accept, admit’- soznanie (nedostatkov) ‘recognition, acceptance, admission (of mistakes)’, nevedenie ‘ignorance’6 and znat´ ‘know’ (ne)znanie (pravil) ‘knowledge/(ignorance) of the rules’ do seem to denote genuine Mental States, as do their nominalizations.

Classical Psychological State predicates of the kind ‘love’, ‘hate’ and so on do seem to be Stative in some important respect and often do form nominalizations. This is also true of one example which we have classed as ‘Physical State’ which gives a nominalization: lomit´sja - lomota (v sustavax).

It would appear that some states are more stative than others (see also Mufwene, 1984). Those predicates that refer to properties of objects are highly reluctant to form nominalizations. Predicates referring to the physical disposition of objects (verbs of spatial configuration or position, as well as verbs of existence, which can be thought of as a subspecies of location) are more likely to form nominals, though one interesting subclass, that of verbs of body posture, only form nominalizations with subjects that are perceived as ‘controlling’ the situation. Finally, Psychological State predicates frequently form nominalizations. On the other hand, a Psychological State is often what is inferred from a rather complex set of behaviours and dispositions, and the bearer of the state is not normally considered to have be totally without control of that state.

The basic conclusion, then, is that a Russian verb which has a clear stative meaning is not likely to form a nominalization.

6. Derived statives

6.1 Derived generics One of the few clear statements one can make about the aspectual system of Russian is that the imperfective aspect in aspectually paired verbs is associated with the meaning of iteration or habituality. Indeed, for many verbs this is the only interpretation open to the imperfective form. Paduèeva (1996:89), following the work of Ju. S. Maslov, argues that such a meaning is part of the definition of aspectual pair and refers to the habitual meaning as the ‘trivial’ meaning of the imperfective (‘trivial’ in the sense that all imperfectives from aspectual pairs have to have at least this meaning). Such imperfectives are said to render the sentence stative (see Smith 1991:318).

The fact that virtually any perfective verb can be put into the imperfective and given the ‘trivial’ habitual reading strongly suggests that we are dealing with a grammatical process and not a lexical one. It would be rather odd to suggest that there are two SMOKE lexemes in English in order to accommodate the habitual and the episodic readings of the verb. Indeed, Krifka et al. (1995:17)

6The noun nevedenie has no verb base in the modern language.


explicit distinguish between habitual/generic sentences which arise through general interpretive processes and what they call ‘lexical statives’. Nonetheless, in the recent work of Paduèeva (1996) it is assumed that imperfective verbs are distinct lexemes from their paired perfectives, even in the ‘trivial’ meaning of the imperfective. Clearly, this makes it impossible to distinguish in a straightforward manner between lexically stative predicates and generics.

The facts of nominalization cast further doubt on the distinct lexemic status of aspectually paired verbs. We have seen that the majority of lexically stative predicates don’t permit nominalizations of any kind. Now, if imperfective verbs with habitual interpretation in Russian are derived lexemes, and hence correspond to our lexically stative predicates, then we would predict that they, too, must resist nominalization in Russian. This, however, is not the case. Indeed, it is precisely the derived imperfectives which provide the most productive nominalizations. Moreover, it is precisely the habitual readings which most regularly license full-blown situation type nominalizations. Indeed, so regular are such nominalizations that they take on something of the character of inflectional forms (see Sadler, Spencer and Zaretskaya 1997 for discussion and detailed illustration). The habitual or generic interpretation is open to a wide range of verb types and the derived aspect is preserved by nominalization. Thus, we can take imperfective verb forms of lexemes denoting Activities, Accomplishments, Achievements or Semelfactives and nominalize the verb to give a habitual or iterative reading: (68) šeptat´ (ženskoe) šeptanie [Activity] (69) raspisat´ ~ raspisyvat´ dannye postojannoe raspisyvanie dannyx [Accomplishment] (70) najdti ~ naxodit´ reguljarnoe naxoždenie novyx mineralov [Achievement] (71) stuknut´ ~ stuèat´ postojannoe stuèanie v dver´ [Semelfactive] Of particular significance is (70) in that the habitual interpretation is the only one available to the imperfective of Achievements (the ‘trivial’ meaning of the imperfective) and this is equally true of the nominalization of this class of Achievements7.

Clearly, then, if habituals are a distinct lexically stative lexemes, then they do not behave in the way we would expect of stative lexemes with respect to nominalization8. This is not unexpected when we look more closely at the relationship between states and habits. As Brinton (1987) points out in some detail, there are probably as many differences between the two as similarities. She argues that habits represent a subtype of aspect (perfective aspect in her analysis), while states are a true situation type (Aktionsart). Of importance is the fact that habituals derived from episodic, dynamic predicates allow two ‘layers’ of modification by temporal adverbials. The ‘inner’ telic Aktionsart component can be modified by bounded adverbials, while the ‘outer’ atelic Aktionsart can be modified by adverbials of duration, as shown in (72): (72) Rabotniki uže desjat´ let proizvodjat ètu operaciju za sem´ minut 7 Interestingly, the same is not true of nominalizations of Achievements such as vyigrat’ ‘win’. Here the imperfective can refer to a preparatory phase: On vyigryvaet partiju means ‘He is winning the game’ in the sense that he has an advantage that will be sufficient to guarantee victory if nothing else happens. However, the nominalization vyigryvanie cannot name this phase, but rather refers to the Achievement: vyigryvanie partii means the same as the English, ‘the winning of the game’, in that it asserts that the game was actually won. It is entirely unclear why Russian (and English) Achievement verbs of this type should behave in this way. 8 Now, it is open to those who hold that habitual imperfectives are lexically derived to claim that the nominalization process has access to the derivational history of such verbs and that the telic ‘inner aspectuality’ licenses the nominalization. However, this is not of immediate concern.


Such examples illustrate that habituals can be at the same time dynamic (indeed, telic) and stative. Nominalization is not sensitive to the stative properties of such predications. Presumably, this means that the nominalization process either occurs before the stative interpretation is established, or that the nominalization itself can be given a stative interpretation, on a par with a clause.

It is not our intention to discuss here the question of whether this is a form of aspectuality, Aktionsart, or something else. What we claim is that habituals cannot be regarded as straightforwardly stative predicates, even if they have certain of the properties of statives.

6.2 Lexically derived habituals - Occupations and Behaviours Paduèeva (1996:149) distinguishes two interesting classes of verb which she claims to be types of stative. These are the class of Zanjatija ‘Occupations’ and Povedenija ‘Behaviours’. Aspectually, they are characterized by the fact that they are evaluated over a ‘superlong’ time interval (the whole of a person’s youth, life, the whole of the existence of an empire and so on). They do not denote properties or relations, and hence do not pass Paduèeva’s first group of five tests. Rather they are ‘generic states’ in the terminology of Vendler (1967:108). The Occupations denote regular, possibly institutionalized activities, which may or may not be associated with a formally definable profession, such as ‘to be a carpenter/teacher/.... In general, the nature of the occupation is defined by the activities associated with that occupation which the person engages in, though intensionality tends to intrude, as is well-known. Thus, a person whose designated profession is life-saver may in principle go through his life without ever being called upon to save anyone’s life. This is not a peculiarity of true Occupations, however, as is well-known from the phenomenon of the ‘unfulfilled office function’, as in Carlson’s (1995:231) Sally handles the mail from Antarctica (which can be true of a secretary even if the office has never had any mail from Antarctica).

The second class, Behaviours (Povedenija), is defined by Paduèeva (1996:149) as verbs in which an activity is given a (negative) evaluative component by a covert observer/narrator. English examples would be ‘put on airs’, ‘fool around’ and so on. Zhdanova (1982) gives a more detailed descriptive breakdown of the class. Paducheva claims that it is the role of the observer in assigning the negative evaluation which renders the verb type stative, though it is not entirely clear to us how this comes about.

Now, as argued in the previous subsection, most verbs denoting human activities can probably be interpreted as Occupations in the broadest sense, in that most such verbs can be used in a generic or habitual sense: Tom smokes, Harriet drives a Mercedes, Dick reads detective stories. The same is true of Russian. What is of interest about the class identified by Paduèeva is that there are some verbs which, apparently, can only be used in this generic sense, such as vorovat´ ‘steal’. This means that they never appear in the present tense with the Continuous (aktualńo-dlitelńoe) meaning, so that (73b) is impossible: (73) a. Vasja voruet Vasja steals ‘Vasja steals/thieves; Vasja is a thief’ b. *Vasja sejèas/v dannyj moment voruet Vasja now/at present moment steals ‘Vasja is stealing now/at the moment’ As suggested in the gloss to (73a), such verbs in English would often be paraphrased in order to stress the Occupation sense, since a verb like ‘steal’ can have an episodic interpretation as well as its (perhaps more common) generic interpretation.

To be sure the facts are not quite as clean as Paduèeva presents. Thus, vorovat´ can be used with episodic interpretation provided it is transitive:


(74) A: Gde Vasja? where Vasja ‘Where’s Vasja?’ B: Pošel jabloki vorovat′ gone apples steal ‘He’s gone stealing apples’ Nonetheless, there are a number of verbs which at best sound very strained if we try to give them an episodic interpretation. We will refer to those Occupations and Behaviours which resist usage in dynamic or episodic contexts as ‘true Occupations/Behaviours’ or simply as ‘Occupations/Behaviours’. Those verbs which Paduèeva identifies as Occupations/Behaviours which nonetheless also seem to be allowable as episodic verbs we will refer to as Pseudo-Occupations/Behaviours. Typical examples (mainly denominal verbs in -stvovat′ and -nièat′) are provided in Appendix 2. Paduèeva herself does not draw more than passing attention to the fact that there are verbs with just a habitual or generic interpretation. We would argue that the existence of true Occupations/Behaviours is of no little interest for any theory of the Russian lexicon and for lexical theory in general.

Being essentially generic situation types, Occupations/Behaviours pass tests for stativity which identify permanent (individual-level) States. In particular, it is not possible to localize these predicates in time. Thus, we cannot say (75a,b): (75) a. *V ètu minutu ona uèitel´stvovala at that minute she taught ‘At that moment she taught’ [Occupation]


b. *V ètu minutu oni duraèilis´ at that minute they played.the.fool ‘At that moment they played the fool’ [Behaviour] Likewise, these predicates are impossible with quantificational adverbials such as dva raza ‘twice’.

Paduèeva (1996:140) adopts a test for individual-level predicates using temporal adverbials which express an ‘intensive’ passage of time, such ves´ veèer ‘all evening’, or vsju (svoju) žizn′ ‘the whole of (one’s) life’. Thus, she reports the following cases as unacceptable, because the adverbial collocates with a permanent State: (76) a. *Vsju molodost′ ona byla krasiva all youth she was beautiful (cf. ‘She was beautiful for the whole of her youth’) b. *Vsju molodost′ ona ljubila govorit′ po telefonu all youth she loved to.talk on telephone (cf. ‘For the whole of her youth she loved to talk on the phone’) On the other hand, the examples in (77) are fine because the predicate expresses a temporary, stage-level State: (77) a. Ves′ den′ veselilis′ all day they.enjoyed.themselves ‘They enjoyed themselves all day’ b. Vse detstvo bolel all childhood he.was.ill ‘He was ill the whole of his childhood’ Occupations/Behaviours pattern with stage-level predicates in this respect, and not with individual-level predicates as we might otherwise expect: (78) a. Ona vsju žizn′ uèitel´stvovala she all life taught ‘She taught for the whole of her life’ [Occupation] b. Oni ves′ veèer duraèilis´ they all evening played.the.fool ‘They played the fool the whole evening’ [Behaviour] Presumably, localizing such a predicate to a specific moment or to a specified number of events is incompatible with the generic nature of the predication, but localizing to the whole of the period when it is relevant is perfectly compatible with a generic predication. In this respect it may be relevant to note that English individual-level predications are perfectly fine with translation equivalents of Paduèeva’s examples in (76).

Paduèeva takes it as a defining characteristic of individual-level States that they cannot be ‘controlled’. Thus, one cannot be deliberately (agentively) intelligent, one cannot deliberately know Russian and one cannot even deliberately be a linguist. Interestingly, the Occupations and Behaviours fail this test, in that they are typically controlled. This is hardly surprising, since such predicates generally presuppose the actions of an agent (cf. also Brinton 1987:199f, who points out that corresponding verbs in English pass all the standard diagnostics for agentivity). There is an interesting set of comparisons here. Thus, if one says of a senior army officer On komanduet armiej ‘He commands the army’ then this means that he must have demonstrated army-commanding behaviour, which, moreover, must have been deliberate and intentional. However, it is possible to say of an individual that they have been designated, say, Field Marshall without that person being aware of the fact. Being a Field Marshall is not a controllable state. Indeed, it is possible to say ‘He was made Field Marshall, but was killed in action before he could be informed of the fact’. Thus, extensionally equivalent predicates can be very different in meaning. Similar remarks are valid of a whole host of


verbs denoting the pursuance of a profession which involves some act of official recognition, designation or admission, such as advokatstvovat´, uèitel´stvovat´ and so on.

This feature of controllability is obviously due to the fact that Occupations and Behaviours are semantic extensions of activities. But this means that they are not canonical individual-level predicates (cf. komandovat′´ (armiej) vs. Maršal ‘Field-Marshall’). Indeed, it is rather misleading to call them ‘generic states’. Rather, we should say that they bear the same relation to concrete, episodic activities that kind-referring nouns bear to object-referring nouns, so in other words, they are ‘generic Activities (or Accomplishments, Achievements etc.)’. Since a number of these verbs only have that generic interpretation, those verbs will be lexically generic Activities. This poses an immediate descriptive problem: how are we going to guarantee that such predicates only have a generic or habitual reading?

In section Error! Reference source not found. we briefly introduced Chierchia’s analysis of individual-level predicates as lexically marked inherent generics. Genericity in his approach is indicated by a quasi-universal quantifier, which can bind individual or situation variables. We argued that this approach doesn’t capture the basic semantic intuition behind individual-level predication, that of ‘property’. The Gen quantifier fails to capture in a satisfying manner the fact that Tom is a smoker predicates a property of Tom, while Tom smokes quantifies over typical situations. The same can now be said of the distinction between Russian expressions such as Žukov komanduet armiej and Žukov - Maršall Armii. However, when we consider the true Occupations/Behaviours in Paduèeva’s typology we are confronted with precisely the type of predicate which Chierchia’s formalism describes: an Activity (Achievement, whatever) predicate which is inherently generic. Thus, we can conclude that Chierchia’s class of verbs does indeed exist, but it isn’t the class he thought it was. We propose, therefore, to adapt Chierchia’s inherent genericity thesis for precisely the lexicalized derived habituals/generics which Paduèeva and others have described for Russian. An Occupation/Behaviour is a verb which is lexically marked with a feature which triggers a Gen quantifier in the semantic or logical representation of sentences.

Chierchia (1995) discusses a number six properties of English individual-level predications in

some detail. In Spencer (1998) it is shown that not all of these properties are really criterial, and one of the others (ability to serve as the complement in a there-sentence) doesn’t apply to Russian9. Nonetheless, it is of interest to apply Chierchia’s criteria to the Occupations/Behaviours.

One of the properties which Chierchia regards as diagnostic of individual-level predication is

the inability of such predicates to cooccur with locative adverbials: (79) *John knew Latin in his office (80) *John was a linguist in his office (81) *John was tall in his office As Miller (1970:493) points out, this property holds of Russian stative verbs too. This is not a property of ordinary habituals, of course. Chierchia offers the ingenious solution that inherent generics are predicated over arbitrary locations, so that ‘x knows (Latin)’ means ‘x knows Latin in arbitrary situations, hence, arbitrary locations’. To specify a specific location is then otiose. In this light it is interesting that Occupations do not pattern like individual-level predications, in that they generally permit locative adverbials10: 9 A property that has received a fair deal of attention is the possibility or otherwise of an existential reading with bare plural subjects. With a stage-level predicate such a reading is possible: Firemen are available/in the garden means There are firemen available/in the garden, while Firemen are altruistic cannot mean There are altruistic firemen, because altruistic is an individual-level predicate (Kratzer 1995). In Russian, however, it is very difficult to distinguish an existential from a universal reading, partly, no doubt because of the impoverished determiner system of Russian. In addition, the existential reading is only natural in Engish with particular types of stage-level predicate. See Spencer (1998) for additional discussion. 10 This is different from the claim made in passing by Paducheva 1996:149. We cannot explain this discrepancy.


(82) Vanja gonèarnièaet v svoem sobstvennom sele Vanja worked.as.potter in his own village ‘Vanja worked as a potter in his own village’ (83) *Maša uèitel′stvuet v ètoj novoj školoj/v Permi Masha taught in this new school/in Perm ‘Masha taught in this new school/in Perm’ Likewise, Behaviours seem to collocate readily with locatives: (84) Oni afiširovali svoi otnošenii pered kollegami they paraded their relationship before colleagues ‘They paraded their relationship in front of their colleagues’ (85) Soldaty èasto p′janstvovali v kazarmax soldiers often got.drunk in barracks ‘The soldiers often went on binges in their barracks’ While it is undoubtedly the case that predicates like know or be intelligent sound odd when localized, the Occupations/Behaviours denote characteristics of an individual which have to manifest themselves in individual actions. These actions themselves can be localized and for that reason there is no incompatibility with locative adverbials. Clearly, the general claim that statives cannot be localized is true for the typical case of basic, non-derived statives, but when the stative is derived, whether lexically or conceptually, from a dynamic situation type then locative modification is possible11.

The other property is the ability to serve as the complement to a perception verb. For reasons

which remain mysterious permanent States (as opposed to temporary ones) cannot serve as complements to perception verbs. (86) *I could see Tom tall (87) I could see Tom on the roof The same seems to hold of Russian derived statives. Occupations: (88) *Ja èasto slyšal, kak Vanja boèarnièaet I often heard how Vanja makes.barrels (cf. I often heard Vanja making barrels’) (89) *Ja èasto videl, kak Maša gonèarnièaet I often saw how Masha makes.pottery (cf. ‘I often saw Masha making pottery’) Behaviours: (90) *Ja èasto slyšu, kak Maša dokuèaet I often hear how Masha pesters (cf. ‘I often hear Masha pestering people’) (91) *Ja èasto vižu, kak Vanja p′janstvuet I often see how Vanja gets.drunk (cf. ‘I often see Vanja going on a binge’)

11 In Spencer (1998) and Spencer and Zaretskaya (1998) we argue that stative middles in Russian and English also take locative adverbials. However, there it is argued that stative middles are lexically stative lexemes. Thus, the fact that locative modification is possible doesn’t show that the predicate can’t be an individual level predicate. The whole question of locative modification seems to involve rather more than just the difference between individuals and stages or individuals. See Spencer (1998) for more detailed discussion.


Notice that the English translations here are acceptable, because the English equivalents permit non-generic readings. Similarly, when we look at the pseudo-Occupations and pseudo-Behaviours we find that these can serve as the complement to a perception verb, provided they refer to temporary activities which are localized in time: (92) Ja èasto videl, kak Maša torguet na rynke I often see how Masha trades at market ‘I often see Masha trading at the market’ (93) Ja èasto slyšu, kak Vanja besnuetsja I often hear how Vanja rants ‘I often hear Vanja ranting’

Although the evidence is somewhat equivocal, on balance it seems reasonable to regard the Occupations/Behaviours as a subtype of individual-level predication. Moreover, not only do these verbs denote permanent states, such states are generic in Brinton’s (1987) sense or are attitudinals in the sense of Bertinetto (1994). Now, in one sense these verbs denote individual actions or events. However, they are prevented from predicating individuated events of their subjects. Instead, they demand that there be a quasi-universal quantification over the subject or over situations. Occupations are closer to generics than to habituals in that they refer to activities which are carried out as a defining condition rather than being simply activities which a subject habitually engages in (see Carlson, 1995, for recent discussion of this point). Thus, a group of reindeer herders in Siberia might in principle break camp and follow the reindeer herd only once every two or three years, yet if the nomadic way of life characterized that group we would describe their practice with the verb koèevat′, without worrying whether this was a ‘habitual’ activity. Indeed, it is quite unclear how we could regard many Occupations as habitual activities of any sort. What sort of habits do you have to have before the verb brigardirstvovat′ applies to you (cf. Vendler, 1967:106)? Similarly, although the set of activities which lead to a Behaviour being predicated of someone may be a habit, the sense of the Behaviour predicate is given by the covert observer, who attaches a value judgement to the description. Thus, when we apply a verb such as p′janstvovat′ ‘carouse’ to someone, we are not just saying that they (habitually) get drunk, rather we are accusing that person of (generically) being a drunkard.

The obvious way of achieving this is to adopt Chierchia’s idea and analyse true

Occupations/Behaviours as inherent generics. In other words, we assume a lexical feature in the lexical representation which triggers the appearance of the Gen quantifier in the semantic representation of sentences containing that predicate12. For the pseudo-Occupations/Behaviours it isn’t obvious that we need to adopt this type of representation, even when we are dealing with generic statements. This is because the grammar must make provision for generic interpretations anyway, as a general property of the interpretation of sentences. Thus, we would claim that the pseudo-Occupations/Behaviours tell us nothing special about the Russian lexicon, but that the true Occupations/Behaviours tell us a great deal.

However, this approach raises one obvious question: if true Occupations/Behaviours are inherently generic, hence, inherently stative, how do they behave with respect to nominalization? As can be seen from the appropriate tables in the Appendix, the majority of such verbs have a corresponding noun. Admittedly, in a great many cases (especially in the case of verbs in -stvovat') the verb is morphologically derived from that noun, rather than the other way round. However, there are plenty of cases in which the noun is clearly deverbal: vorovat' ⇒ vorovstvo, koèevat' ⇒ koèevanie and in any case even when the direction of derivation is noun to verb in the morphology, semantically it would appear that the noun still functions as the nominalization of the verb. This is not what our discussion of stative predicates would lead us to expect. In this respect, the true Occupations/Behaviours contrast alarmingly with the stative middles, which we have argued are also lexically stative and which therefore never accept (deverbal) nominalizations (Spencer and Zaretskaya, 1998).

12 If we are to distinguish habituals from generics then it may not, ultimately, be sufficient to use the same formal device for each type (cf. Lenci, 1995, Verkuyl 1995, and for relevant metaphysical discussion, Carlson, 1995).


While true Occupations/Behaviours are lexically stative predicates, conceptually they are generalizations over activities of various sorts. A person is a thief or a nomad in the same way that he is a smoker or a driver of fast cars (in any language). Moreover, the subject is invariably held responsible for the Occupation/Behaviour, either by virtue of being the controlling participant in an activity in the case of an Occupation, or by virtue of being morally responsible for the property which attracts opprobium in the case of a Behaviour. This contrasts with the stative middle, whose subject is invariably a passive participant (often an ‘affected object’). Thus, we can readily account for the otherwise surprising nominalization patterns by noting that Occupations/Behaviours are States which (unlike canonical States) show a high degree of what Dowty (1991) would regard as ‘Proto-Agent entailments’. This is perhaps not too surprising when we note that many of the verbs of this group are derived from nouns (some of which are themselves derived from verbs) denoting people who engage in the Occupation or Behaviour (car'stvovat', farisejstvovat' and many others).

Something like our lexical generic analysis of true Occupations/Behaviours seems to be

required on any theory of the Russian lexicon. As an absolute minimum there has to be some way of ensuring that the true Occupations/Behaviours have only generic and not episodic readings. Given that there are a fair number of verbs in both the true Occupations/Behaviours subgroup and the ‘pseudo’ group it is not an inherent property of verbs which permit such an interpretation that they have to be lexically generic. We have so far not found any property which predicts when such a verb will be a ‘true’ member, and so we conclude (provisionally, at least) that this is an idiosyncratic property.


7. Conclusions We have provided a descriptive survey of Russian stative verbs and their ability or otherwise to nominalize. In Spencer and Zaretskaya (1998) we argue for another class of stative verbs, namely, those corresponding to middle constructions familiar from other European languages. We argue that they, too, fail to nominalize, indeed, this is a key feature which allows us to recognize such a class. We have not set ourselves the goal of explaining why some classes of stative verb fail to nominalize and why others, especially Psychological State verbs, readily admit nominalizations. We suspect that part of the explanation will lie in the special nature of psychological predicates. It may well be, for instance, that Psychological or Mental States are less ‘stative’ than the Physical States of inanimate objects. One might even wish to extend Dowty’s (1991) approach to theta-roles and explore the idea that aspectual classes such as State, Activity, Accomplishment represent not watertight groupings but rather Proto-Situations which give rise to situational entailments. A core State, Accomplishment or whatever would then be the type of situation which gave rise to the greatest number of State-, Accomplishment-, etc. entailments and cases of mismatch might then be accounted for by careful consideration of the sets of entailments a given predicate makes.

In any event, we would argue that the stative predicate in Russian represents an unusually rich vein for the lexical semanticist, and one that has been generously opened up by the painstaking and insightful works of scholars such as Bulygina (1982), Paduèeva (1996) and their colleagues. Moreover, a serious study of this area of the lexicon could well help throw light on one of the most puzzling sets of problems in formal semantics, the nature of stative and generic predications.


8. References Aronoff, Mark 1976. Word Formation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bertinetto, Pier Marco 1994. Statives, progressives, and habituals: analogies and differences.

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Temporal Reference. Aspect and Actionality. Vol. 1 Semantic and Syntactic Perspectives. Torina: Rosenberg & Sellier

Brinton, Laurel J. 1987. The aspectual nature of states and habits. Folia Linguistica 21:195-214. Bulygina, T. V. 1982. K postroeniju tipologii predikatov v russkom jazyke. Chapter One of

Selivertsova, O. N. (ed.), Semantièeskie tipy predloèenija, Moscow: Nauka. 7-85. Carlson, Gary N. 1980. Reference to Kinds in English. University of Massachusetts PhD dissertation,

Amherst. Published by Garland Press, New York. Carlson, Gary, N. 1995. Truth conditions of generic sentences: two contrasting views. In: Carlson and

Pelletier (eds.), 224-237. Carlson, Gary, N. and Pelletier, Francis Jeffry (eds.) 1995. The Generic Book. Chicago: Chicago

University Press. Chierchia, Gennaro 1995. Individual-level predicates as inherent generics. In: Carlson and Pelletier

(eds.), 176-223. Comrie, Bernard 1976. Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dowty, David, R. 1991. Thematic proto-roles and argument selection. Language 67, 547-619. Grimshaw, Jane 1990. Argument Structure. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Jesperson, Otto 1992. Philosophy of Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [1924] Klein, Wolfgang 1995. A time-relational analysis of Russian aspect. Language 74: 669-695. Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria 1993. Nominalizations. London: Routledge. Kratzer Kratzer, Angelika 1995. Stage level and individual level predicates. In: Carlson and Pelletier

(eds.), 125-175. Krifka, Manfred, Pelletier, Francis Jeffry, Carlson, Gregory, N. ter Meulen, Alice, Chierchia, Gennaro,

and Link, Godehard 1995. Genericity: An introduction. In: Carlson and Pelletier (eds.), 1-124. Lenci, Alessandro 1995. The semantic representation of non-quantificational habituals. In: Bertinetto

et al. (eds.), 143-158. Maslov, Ju. S. 1948. Vid i leksièeskoe znaèenie glagola v russkom jazyke. Izvestija AN SSSR. Ser. lit.

i jaz. Tom 7, vyp. 4, 303-316. Miller, James E. 1970. Stative verbs in Russian. Foundations of Linguistics 6: 483-504. Mufwene, Saliloko 1984. Stativity and the progressive. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics

Club. Paduèeva, Elena Viktorovna 1996. Semanticheskie issledovanie. Moskva: Jazyki russkoj kul’tury. Pesetsky, David 1995. Zero Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sadler, Louisa, Spencer, Andrew and Zaretskaya, Marina 1997. A morphomic account of a syncretism

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Publishers.


Stative predicates in Russian and their nominalizations

9. Appendix 1 Properties and relations

4.1 Verbs of inherent property Nominalization bodat´sja - kartavit´ - kosit´ - kuèerjavit´sja - kudrjavit´sja - kurèavit´sja - kusat´sja - reagirovat´ skripet´ (o dveri) - stoit´ (imet´ cenu) - vesit´ - vit´sja (of hair) - vmešèat´ - xromat´ - zavivat´sja - 4.2 Relation between facts/events Nominalization bazirovat´sja - govorit´ (svidetel´stvovat´) - dokazyvat́ (služit́ dokazat.) - ob"jasnjat´sja - osnovyvat´sja - oznaèat´ - podtverždat́ - predšestvovat´ predšestvie predstojat´ (stojat´ pered) - predvešèat´ - protivoreèit´ - stroit´sja - svidetel´stvovat´ - udostoverjat´ - ukazyvat´ (na èto-to) - zaviset´ - ziždit́ sja - znaèit´ - znamenovat´ -


4.3 Relations between objects Nominalizationèislit´sja -delit´sja -dovodit´sja -garmonirovat´ -imet´ (formu, vid) -obladat´ (svojstvom) obladanie (svojstvom)obrazovyvat´ (gruppu) -obstojat´ -otlièat´sja -otnosit´sja otnošenie (myšlenija k bytiju)podxodit´ (godit´sja) -poxodit´ (na kogo) -predstojat´ -prinadležat́ prinadležnost́ (dannoj vešèi prixodit´sja -prixodit´sja (rodst) -proisxodit´ proisxoždenie (èeloveka ot raspolagat´ -ravnjat´sja -soderžat́ -sootvetstvovat´ sootvetstvie (politiki novymsostojat´ (iz) -sostojat´ (v) -umešèat´sja - vmešèat´sja - vxodit´ (v sostav) ego vxoždenie (v sostav vydeljat´sja -xarakterizovat´sja -zašèišèat´ -znaèit´sja - 4.4 Semiotic relation Nominalization glasit´ - izobražat́ - javljat´sja (èem/kem) - oboznaèat´ - predstavljat´ - vyražat́ -


4.5 Spatial configuration Nominalization doxodit´ - granièit´ - idti (raspolagat´sja vdol´, nad) - ležat (neoduš.)´ - naxodit´sja (neoduš.) - peresekat´ (neoduš.) - peresekat´sja pereseèenie (dorog)- pokoit´sja - pomešèat´sja - primykat´ primykanie (novogo rajona k portovoj prolegat´ proleganie (tropinki èerez les) proxodit´ proxoždenie (dorogi èerez les) protekat´ protekanie (reki èerez gorod) raspolagat´sja raspoloženie (zony otdyxa rjadom s razmešèat´sja razmešèenie (muzeja vo dvorce) sosedstvovat´ ?sosedstvovanie (Èeèni s Ingušetiej) stojat´ (neoduš.) - vozvyšat´sja vozvyšenie (bašni nad gorodom) vpadat´ vpadenie (reki v Kaspij) vysit´sja -

4.6 Properties of a class Nominalization vzimat´ vzimat´sja vodit´sja vstreèat´sja nasèityvat´


States 4.7 Perceived States Nominalization alet´ - bagrjanet´ - bagrovet´ - belet´ - belet´sja - blagouxat´ blaguxanie (roz) èernet´ - èernet´sja - èujat´sja - èuvstvovat´sja - dominirovat´ (tower above) - gospodstvovat´ (tower above) - izvivat´sja - kazat´sja - klonit´sja - krasnet´ - krasnet´sja - lilovet´ - majaèit´ (be seen) - merešèit´sja (be seen) - mret´ (be seen) - naklonjat´sja - navisat´ navisanie (ledjanyx glyb) nesti (paxnut´) - nispadat´ - ošèušèat´sja - oblegat´ - obramljat´ - obstupat´ - obvivat´ - okajmljat´ - okružat́ - opletat´ - opojasyvat´ - oputyvat´ - oxvatyvat´ - padat´ - paxnut´ - petljat´ petljanie (tropinki) pomešèat´sja - povisat´ - povoraèivat´ - razit´ (paxnut´) - razlièat´sja (be seen) - rozovet´ - sadit´ (paxnut´) - sklonjat´sja - smerdet´ smerdenie (trupov) spadat´ - spuskat´sja - svešivat´sja -


svisat´ - seret´ - seret´sja - sinet´ - sinet´sja - skryvat´sja (be covered from view) - slyšat´sja - torèat´ (be seen) - tjanut´sja - uklonjat´sja - uvivat´ - vidnet´sja (be seen) - vybivat´sja (be seen) - vygljadet´ - vygljadyvat´ (be seen) - vylezat´ (be seen) - vysovyvat´sja (be seen) - viljat´ - viset´ - vit´sja - vonjat´ - vydavat´sja - vydvigat´sja - vystupat´ - zagibat´sja - zavoraèivat´ - zagoraživat́ - zakryvat´ - zaslonjat´ - zelenet´ - zelenet´sja - želtet́ - želtet́ sja - zijat´ (be seen) - zmeit´sja -


4.8 Physical States Nominalization bolet´ (o èasti tela) bolet´ (o èeloveke) èesat´sja (o èasti tela) dergat´ (o èasti tela) drognut´ (zjabnut´) gnoit´sja golodat´ <golodanie> gudet´ (o èasti tela) iznemogat´ iznemoženie kišet´ klonit´ (ko snu) lixoradit´ lomat´ (aèe) lomit´ <lomota (v sustavax)> majat´sja <maeta (ljudej v merznut´ moknut´ muèit´sja muèenie, a ne žizn´ mutit´ (tošnit´) nedomogat´ nedužit́ nezdorovit´sja nyt´ (aèe) pustovat´ šèemit´ <?šèemlenie (v serdce)> stradat´ stynut´ (merznut´) styt´ (merznut´) sverbit´ <sverbenie, sverbež> tošnit´ trešèat´ (aèe) trjasti (lixoradit´) valjat´sja (o vešèax) xvorat´ zdravstvovat´ žit́ (proživat́ žizn´) žitie, žit́ e znobit´ zudet´ 4.9 Modal States Nominalization nadležat́ - nuždat́ sja (v pomošèi) - podležat́ - predstojat´ (emu predstoit) - stoit´ (emu stoit pojti) -


4.10 Verbs of domination Nominalization carit´ - dominirovat´ dominirovanie (èmocij nad zdravym smyslom) gospodstvovat´ podèinjat´sja podèinenie (bol´šinstva men´šinstvu) preobladat (nad) preobladanie (ženskogo naselenija nad prevalirovat´ ?prevalirovanie vladyèestvovat´ - vlastvovat´ - 4.11 Verbs of existence and presence Nominalization byt´ (sušèestvovat´) byté, bytie byt´ (prebyvat´) bytnost´ bytovat´ bytovanie (obrjadov i tradicij) imet´sja za neimeniem (deneg v bjudžete) nalièestvovat´ nalièie naxodit´sja (neoduš.) ?naxoždenie otsutstvovat´ (neoduš.) otsutstvie (sredstv) prisutstvovat´ (neoduš.) prisutstvie (tvorèeskoj žilki) protekat´ protekanie (reki v ètom rajone) rasti (o dereve) sušèestvovat´ sušèestvovanie žit́ (sušèestvovat́ ) žizn´, žit́ e


4.12 Psychological States- emotions Nominalization besit´sja bešenstvo besnovat´sja besnovanie bespokoit´sja bespokojstvo bezumstvovat´ ?bezumstvovanie blagogovet´ blagogovenie blagovolit´ blagovolenie blaženstvovat́ blaženstvo bogotvorit´ ?bogotvorenie bojat´sja bojazn´ budoražit́ sja - bujanit´ ?bujanstvo bujstvovat´ bujstvo buševat´ ?buševanie ètit´ - divit´sja - dosadovat´ ?dosadovanie drejfit´ - dut´sja - gnevat´sja - gorevat´ - gorjaèit´sja - grustit´ - idealizirovat´ idealizirovanie iznyvat´ - izumljat´sja izumlenie kipet´ - kipjatit´sja - konfuzit´sja - kuksit´sja - likovat´ likovanie ljubit´ ljubov´ ljutovat´ ?ljutovanie majat´sja maeta muèit´sja muèenie naslaždat́ sja naslaždenie nedoljublivat´ ?nedoljublivanie negodovat´ negodovanie neistovstvovat´ neistovstvo nenavidet´ nenavist´ nervnièat´ - obožat́ obožanie ogorèat´sja ogorèenie opasat´sja opasenie otèaivat´sja otèajanie panikovat´ - peèalit´sja - pereživat́ pereživanie poèitat´ poètenie, poèitanie pološit´sja - poražat́ sja - preklonjat´sja preklonenie


prezirat´ prezrenie psixovat´ - radovat´sja radost´ raskaivat´sja raskajanie rasstraivat´sja rasstrojstvo revnovat´ revnost´ serèat´ - serdit´sja - skorbet´ - skuèat´ - smušèat´sja smušèenie, -ost´ soèuvstvovat´ soèuvstvie sokrušat´sja sokrušenie (obs.) sovestit´sja - sožalet́ sožalenie stesnjat´sja stesnenie stradat´ stradanie strašit´sja - stydit´sja - terpet´ terpenie terzat´sja terzanie tjagotit´sja - tomit´sja tomlenie toržestvovat́ toržestvo toskovat´ - trepetat´ trepetanie trevožit́ sja - udivljat´sja udivlenie umiljat´sja umilenie upivat´sja upoenie uvažat́ uvaženie volnovat´sja volnenie vosxišèat´sja vosxišèenie vynosit´ (neg.) - xandrit´ - zavidovat´ zavist´ žalet́ žalost́ zlit´sja zlost´; zloba zlobit´sja - zloradstvovat´ zloradstvo


4.12 Mental states Nominalizationinteresovat´sja -kolebat´sja kolebanie (res)-nadejat´sja -nedoumevat´ nedoumenie (slušatelej)ožidat́ (èto) -podozrevat´ (èto) -podrazumevat´ -polagat´ -pomnit´ -predvidet´ predvidenie (sobytij)rassèityvat´ (na) rassèet (na podderžku)sèitat´ (èto) -sklonjat´sja (k mneniju) -somnevat´sja somnenie (res)soznavat´ soznanie (svoej nezavisimosti)sudit´ (o èem/kom) -vedat´ (znat´) nev<edenie (=neznanie,znat´ znanie (zakonov), neznanie 4.12 Desire Nominalization alkat´ alkanie (slavy) xotet´ ?xotenie (po moemu xotet´sja - želat́ želanie (svobody) žaždat́ žažda (mesti)- izvolit´ ?izvolenie (obs.) voždelet́ - 4.12 Intention Nominalization dumat´ (sobirat´sja) - metit´ - nadejat´sja nadežda (na vyzdorovlenie) namerevat´sja namerenie (uèit´sja) planirovat´ - pomyšljat´ - predpolagat (sobirat´sja) - pretendovat´ - rassèityvat´ - sobirat´sja - stremit´sja stremlenie (ljudej k miru) tjagotet´ tjagotenie (k muzyke) tjanut´sja (stremit´sja) tjaga (k literaturnym


10.

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