From: pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky)
Subject: Russian dative + infinitive [Re: Chomsky's "Minimalist" paper]
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 18:41:38 GMT

In article <1992Jul30.114240.14315@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny) writes:
>In article <1992Jul30.131645.648@athena.mit.edu> 
>pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
>
>>In article <SCHILLER.92Jul29190137@tira.uchicago.edu>
>>schiller@tira.uchicago.edu (Eric Schiller) writes:


I won't quote any of this.  If you care about it, you've already read
it.

The informal nature of the discussion, combined with the use of examples made
up by non-native speakers like me with fair-to-adequate grasp of the
language, has left me confused about whether there is real disagreement
between Zeleny & friends on the one hand and the recent linguistics
literature on the other hand about the existence and use of dative +
infinitive in Russian.  In my experience of asking questions of
Russians, an error in the choice of perfective vs. imperfective verb or a
slightly askew use of a word can give useless results.  So let me turn
to a native-written source.

In this category, I have nothing better here at home than Pulkina and
Zakhava-Nekrasova's pretty dull and stupid grammar textbook "Russian",
which was the mainstay of dreary once-weekly "grammar lectures" when I
was in college.  However, though they are frequently obtuse and always
boring, I have never known them to lie.

Page 538 gives a list of "impersonal sentences" in which the "infinitive
[is] used as the predicate".  All of these have associated datives, and
no overt modal.  Yet the meaning of each corresponds to the meaning of
an English modal.  The translations are theirs; the glosses and modals
are mine:

Nam skoro exat'
We-DAT soon go-INFIN
We are to go soon
[should, ought, must]

Mne vystupat' pervomu
Me-DAT speak-INFIN first-DAT
I am the first to speak
[have-to, am-to]

Emu ne ponjat' etogo
Him-DAT NEG understand-INFIN this-GEN 
He can't understand this
[can]

Byt' dozhdju
Be-INFIN rain-DAT
It will rain
[will, shall]

They give a bunch of other examples, e.g.

Zavtra, rovno v vosem' chasov, vsem byt' zdes'.
Tomorrow at eight sharp everyone must be here  (everyone-DAT be-INFIN)

So someone out there in Russia allows the modal use of infinitive with
dative subject.  What is so interesting is the fact that the
interpretation ranges over all (almost all?) the uses to which modal
verbs get put.  Hypothesis: there is a null all-purpose modal somewhere
in these sentences.  Further hypothesis: it is the copula, which is null
in the present tense in Russian (except in existential sentences and a
few other places; rabota est' rabota).

Next question: is there a past tense of any of these constructions?  My
understanding was that in each case, except perhaps `byt' dozhdju` [here
I just don't know], there is a past tense which is formed with the
neuter past tense copula `bylo`.  Nothing in Pulkina one way or another
about this, that I can see.

Furthermore, I have no reason to think that things go haywire if the
infinitival verb takes a dative object, but I'd be interested to hear if
someone accepts `emu ne ponjat' etogo` but fails to accept `emu ne
pomoch' etoj devushke` (with "pomoch'" `help` taking a dative object
"etoj devushke" `this girl`).

Let me know.

-David Pesetsky

Xref: sparky sci.lang:6121 soc.culture.soviet:6336