genitive case in "chto novogo?"

[robert beard]

It just occurred to me that the reason that "chto" doesn't allow modifiers
is that it  is an NP like personal pronouns (which also don't take modifier
categories (although they might occur with empty allomorphic markers)).
"Chto-nibud'", etc. are Ns.  "Chto takoe" is an example of this:  "takoe"
has no meaning or grammatical functions, as indicated by the factd that
"Chto eto takoe?" means exactly the same thing as "Chto eto?"  This strikes
me as morphological differences and if they are consistent across
languages, I don't see how they could be explained as lexical fortuities.

I don't understand the point of the Polish examples, Bob.  They look like
the same kind of syntactic way around the problem that George explained in
connection with the Russian data.  They represent two NPs, don't they?

--Bob Beard
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Robert Beard
   Telephone: 717-524-1336
Russian & Linguistics Programs
 Fax: 717-524-3760
Bucknell University
     Lewisburg, PA 17837
RUSSIA AND NIS Web Site:         http://www.bucknell.edu/departments/russian
MORPHOLOGY ON THE INTERNET:             http://www.bucknell.edu/~rbeard
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