The overgeneration problem and the case of semipredicatives in Russian 33
- Comparison of approaches: Overarching issues
In this section the various approaches are compared from the perspective of three
potentially problematic areas. These are (i) how agreement/case transmission is han-
dled, (ii) how they (might) deal with the issue of variation, and (iii) how the overgen-
eration problem is addressed.
4.1 Agreement in case
Other than Grebenyova (2005), which is about regular adjectives, the general focus
of the works surveyed in Section 3 is on the SD. On the other hand, the mechanics
of case transmission are typically brushed aside. Although the implicit assumption
is that OC implies agreement in case, not just phi features, how this actually works is
not discussed. Although I will eventually concur with Bondaruk’s (2013) treatment of
copular clauses in Polish that the facts warrant a feature-sharing solution, it is worth
considering what, if anything, previous investigators have said about this.
For Babby, the semipredicative takes on the case of whatever NP eventually
gets assigned the external theta-role of its VP. The question is how far back (i.e. up
the tree) the adjective can look to find its case. In his original 1998 VB system, the
domain of agreement is S rather than VP. In the 2009 version, in which an InfP with
a PRODAT specifier corresponds to earlier S and an InfP with no specifier corre-
sponds to earlier VP, the distinction is not so easily formalized in terms of domain.
Rather, it seems to me, one would have to treat all InfP the same, ignoring InfP as a
possible boundary, but blocking agreement over a PRODAT subject, as schematized
in (34):
(34) a. agreement: [TP-FIN NP VFIN [InfP VINF semipredicative]]
b. no agreement: [TP-FIN NP VFIN [InfP PRODAT VINF semipredicative]]
The idea that an intervening potential antecedent blocks agreement accords well with
Babby’s account, since the variation in (35) follows from the assumption that, for
speakers who accept agreement, the presence of a PRODAT in [Spec, InfP] is optional:
(35) Pavel poprosil Ivana [ne idti na prazdnik odnogo/odnomu].
Pavel asked Ivan.acc not go.inf to party one.acc/dat
‘Pavel asked Ivan not to go to the party alone.’
Agreement in (35) shows that the matrix object is accessible, but this fact introduces
a new problem, since the presence of an intervening object does not necessarily block
agreement in case. This is shown by transitive subject control verbs such as promise,