44 Steven Franks
b. [Emu sest’ v tjurmu] to že samoe, čto
he.dat sit.inf in jail the same as
[mne pokončit’ žizn’ samoubijstvom].
I.dat finish.inf life suicide.inst
‘For him to go to jail would be the same as for me to commit suicide.’Here, as with most occurrences of the SD, there does not seem to be any semantic rea-
son to invoke a higher modal. Babby (2009: §5.1) offers more such examples, claiming
that “when an infinitive clause with an overt dative subject functions as an argument of
a matrix lexical verb, it will not have a modal reading since the mP is not licensed here.”
This leaves unresolved the question of what exactly distinguishes such examples from
those in (44).
Be that as it may, the fact that structure above VP seems appropriate in overt
dative constructions still does not tell us if comparable structure is needed for the
semipredicative to receive dative case. Surely, in most of the SD cases in (7) there is no
semantic reason to invoke a higher modal; indeed, the impossibility of an overt dative
correlates with absence of modality, yet this has no bearing on the availability of the
SD. So we are still left with the questions of why, under the traditional agreement
approach, PRODAT occurs in contexts where overt datives cannot and why the (semi-
predicative) agreement target can be overtly dative whereas the controller of agree-
ment (PRODAT) cannot. Under the alternative direct assignment approach advocated
here, the questions are why the SD can be assigned to (adjunct) semipredicatives but
not to (argument) subject NPs and why the dative cannot be assigned to ordinary
predicate adjectives.
I contend that the key lies in the last question: the semipredicatives sam and odin
belong to a special mixed “pronominal” declensional type. They are defective adjec-
tives in that, although in the oblique cases they have ordinary adjectival endings, in
the direct (non-oblique) cases their form is that of nouns. It is for this reason that they
can be assigned case directly. Historically, long form adjectives were constructed by
adding pronouns to adjectives with nominal endings, so that there were both short
and long form cased adjectives. The former lost case features and are now archaic,
hence can only function in a (caseless) predicative capacity. The semipredicatives,
however, remain nominal remnants in the direct cases (e.g. odin, odna, odni, odnu
instead of *odnij, *odnaja, *odnie, *odnuju). It is this property that makes them special
and enables them to be assigned case directly, unlike true adjectives, which can only
receive case by virtue of the mediation of some nominal with which they agree. These
are thus two different routes for the valuation of case features.
Some corroboration for this idea can be found in the fact that the historical loss
of oblique short forms correlates with the limitation of the SD to the semipredica-
tives. Short forms of adjectives in modern Russian are caseless and morphologically