EXTRAPOSITION OF ELEMENTS OUT OF SOME SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES IN RUSSIAN

Abstract

It is often claimed that word order is relatively free in Russian. In this language extraposition out of clauses, NPs and PPs often takes place as an instance of scrambling phenomena. The purpose of this paper is to describe and generalize these phenomena from a formalist point of view. Elements can be extraposed out of clauses, when the bounding nodes, i.e., the subordinate Ss, are deleted by S-PRUNING, as Comrie (1973) proposed. Although Comrie (1973) claimed that this deletion takes place when that clause has no overt subject or COMP, I argue that it takes place when the clause is untensed. On the other hand, while Ss behave as bounding nodes in Russian syntax, NPs and PPs are not for extraposition out of these categories. In other words, extraposition out of these two categories are not blocked by the SUBJACENCY CONDITION. Instead I propose an alternative condition on the extraposability of elements out of NPs and PPs. It says that elements which are not case-marked as sentence arguments cannot be extraposed out of NPs and PPs.