Information structure and the status of NP in Russian

Autor/innen

  • Dina Brun

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.23.2001.112

Abstract

In his 1995 monograph, Apresyan suggests that it would be extremely interesting to investigate the means of expressing the definiteness/indefiniteness opposition in languages that do not have articles. In this paper, I will attempt to find possible correlations between the organization of discourse and the positions in which the (in)definite nominals may appear within a sentence of Russian. I will examine the information structure of Russian sentences and, based on the previous analyses, provide a new account of their organization with respect to information packaging. I will then look at various nominal elements contained in certain parts of a sentence and arrive at a system describing the distribution of NPs in Russian with respect to the information structure. The ultimate goal of this paper is to establish and motivate a system of correlations between various types of NPs and functions of information structure. This goal will be achieved by determining which characteristic of a NP may serve as a criterion allowing to provide a one-to-one mapping.

 

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Veröffentlicht

2001

Zitationsvorschlag

Brun, Dina. 2001. „Information Structure and the Status of NP in Russian“. ZAS Papers in Linguistics 23 (Januar):39-57. https://doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.23.2001.112.