Evidential causative in Russian

The article focuses on a special use of Russian transitive causative verbs, as in Žurnalisty uvol’njajut ètogo trenera načinaja s tret'jego tura ‘Journalists are firing this manager since the third round’. In this use, transitive verbs express the fact that the information is unreliable and conveyed by rumours — this is a type of evidential meaning, although, as shown in the article, other meanings related to unreliable information are also compatible with this type of construction. The following link between causative and evidential meanings is postulated: unreliable information reported in contexts under analysis describes an alternative, incorrect world and is conceptualized as if it changed the real world. The formal organization of the evidential causative construction makes it similar to Russian constructions of threat (Ja tebe poguljaju ‘Don’t you dare go out!’) and occasional causative constructions (Ja čajnik eščё ne zakipela ‘I haven’t yet boiled the kettle’). In all these cases, the verb is not lexically labile — rather, unmarked derivation adds an additional component to the basic situation and, correspondingly, adds a new participant. At the same time, the constructional expression of evidentiality makes the evidential causative construction similar to other Russian constructions, in which the evidential meaning is expressed by introducing a peripheral argument to the construction (as in Tebe ljuboj rajon plox ‘Every district is bad to you / according to your words’ or U tebja vse ploxie ‘Everyone is bad to you / according to your words’), without a dedicated evidential marker. As I show, the construction under analysis exhibits interesting semantic and syntactic properties. First, it is incompatible with transitive verbs that do not allow subject omission. Second, some types of modifiers and pronominal elements take scope either over the evidential subevent (i.e, the rumor itself) or over the content of the rumor, which also distinguishes the evidential causative construction from the standard use of transitive verbs.