The fine structure of the Russian noun phrase: A comparative perspective

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Ljudmila Geist
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 445439335

The main goal of the project is to investigate the nominal categories responsible for the classification and countability of nouns in order to provide a basis for a new refined theory of the low domain of the DP structure. The specific goal is to develop a proposal for the fine-grained structure of the DP in Russian which can also account for differences to German and to Chinese. Since the formulation of the DP-hypothesis in the 90s and the introduction of D as a functional category for determiners, various functional projections below D have been added to integrate nominal categories such as gender and number but also to account for classifiers in classifier languages. However, the research of the past 20 years reveals a spectacular variation in countability types and types of nominal classification, as well as differences in the expression of definiteness between languages with an overt D and languages for which a covert D has been proposed. This suggests that some fine-tuning or even more radical modifications of the DP structure are necessary.In order to provide an empirical basis for the refinement of DP-structure we will investigate nominal categories of the lower DP-domains responsible for classification and countability of nouns in Russian, a morphologically rich language. Although Russian has no articles and hence is impoverished in the higher domain of the DP, it has a very differentiated lower domain. An examination of the lower DP-domain in this language is particularly illuminating since many categories in Russian are given morphological expression that in other language are only contextually available and are often difficult to pin down or to distinguish from other categories. It is well known that besides being specified for gender and declensional class, nouns in Russian are specified for animacy and have an elaborate expressive morphology. A new observation which will be further investigated in the project is that beside the count and mass class Russian grammatically recognizes an additional collective/singulative class. Moreover, a look at diachrony reveals a similarity of Russian and other Slavic languages to classifier languages. It can be shown that some suffixes for declensional class specification in present-day Russian are residues of former semantically transparent classifiers. Russian will be compared to German as a language with an article and to Chinese as a classifier language. This comparison will contribute not only to the typology of countability and noun classification but also to the theoretical debate about the universality of functional categories. I will discuss the adequacy of different syntactic approaches to language variation such as the Cartographic Approach, the Universal Spine Model and the theory of Principles and Parameters for capturing language variation in the structure of noun phrases.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants