Russian sentences of the type Mne negde spat′ ‘I have no place to sleep’: Once more

The paper describes Russian sentences of the form (i) Mne est′ gde spat′ ‘I have a place to sleep’ and (ii) Mne Ønegde spat′ ‘I have no place to sleep’. It is shown that there is no syntactic parallelism between such sentences: in (i), the worform est′ is the present-tense form of the existential verb bytʹIII.2 ≈ ‘there be’, and the wordform gde is the pseudo-relative pronominal adverb gde2a, which depends on the verb in the infinitive (on spatʹ); in (ii), the wordform Ø is the zero present-tense form of the copula bytʹI.1 ‘be’, and negde ≈ ‘there being no place’ is a predicative pronominal adverb, which obligatorily depends on bytʹI.1in the role of a support verb. The lexical entry for negde is supplied. A phrase of the form gde mne spatʹ lit. ‘where to me to sleep’ is a particular syntactic formation: a modal-infinitive phrase. Such a phrase and the verb bytʹIII.2 constitute a syntactically discontinuous collocation of a special type. The problem of actant transfer in collocations with a support verb (from the base to the collocate) is considered; the schematic overviews of the vocables bytʹ and gde are proposed.