Russian possessive question

[George Fowler]

Greetings!

Loren Billings wrote:

>Olga Yokoyama (olga at humnet.ucla.edu) has been arguing for years that
>non-reflexive possessive pronominals (_ego_, _ee_, and _ix_) are used in
>such examples as the one below if one empathize with the (potential)
>antecedent of the reflexive.  Obviously, _attestat_ is not a very
>empathy-laden entity.  The example Yokoyama gave me was the ff:  _Ona
>poshla k ee zaveduiushchei_ 'she's gone to (see) her boss', where the
>speaker does not empathize with the clause's subject _ona_.

The best exposition of these sentences that I know of is in:

Yokoyama, Olga and Emily Klenin. "The Semantics of 'Optional' Rules:
Russian Personal and Reflexive Possessives". Ladislav Matejka, ed. (?),
Sound, Sign, and Meaning, 1976, 249-76.

(This is cited from memory plus a course syllabus where I had the students
read the paper; ed may be wrong, and I don't have city/publisher. Sorry!)

In this paper, the authors analyze two sentences where intense disempathy
seems a plausible explanation for "overruling" the supposedly mandatory
reflexive in case of third-person coreference. In the sentence Wayles
originally asked about, with "attestat" as the grammatical subject,
disempathy wouldn't seem to be a plausible explanation.

Another type of approach could be explored for these sentences (very
interesting ones, too), following:

Schwartz, Linda. "Russian Reflexive Controllers". BLS 12: 235-45, 1986.

In this paper the author utilizes a semantic hierarchy of subject types
(agent > theme > ... or whatever they are), following Foley & Van Valin if
memory serves, in an attempt to explain the variation in reflexive
"control" (in the broad, non-theoretical sense of that term). She is not a
Slavist, and the data are not interesting in the way that Yokoyama &
Klenin's are, but there may be merit to the approach. It is not unlike the
similar hierarchy-based approach advocated by Timberlake in his paper in
Morphosyntax in Slavic (1980?), although the Timberlake analysis has more
to do with grammatic/functional role, while Schwartz' has more to do with
the semantic nature of the subject (and thus is closer to what we need
here, although I don't see that her system would predict Wayles' examples).
Schwartz returned to this analysis in a reworked and broader-ranging
context in:

Schwartz, Linda. "Thematic Relations and Case Linking in Russian". Syntax
and Semantics 21: 167-89.

Assuming that the original examples are not a flat-out mistake (and it's an
odd mistake to make, unless it reflects some real current in Russian
grammar), then I'd say they serve as one more indication, if we need any
more, that it is difficult to accommodate real language-usage data in an
"all-or-nothing" model of grammar ("reflexives are tied to subjects",
"such-and-such an NP is/is not a subject", "therefore the NP must/must not
trigger reflexivization"). But who the hell knows.

George Fowler

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