Making sense of variable number agreement in Russian
Natalia V. Ivlieva
HSE University, Moscow, Russia; nivlieva@hse.ru
Alexander V. Podobryaev
HSE University, Moscow, Russia; apodobryaev@hse.ru
Abstract:
In this paper, we focus on Russian quantified noun phrases that are known to be able to trigger plural verbal agreement or no agreement at all. Descriptively, we offer a novel generalization: when such phrases trigger plural verbal agreement, they cannot be interpreted in the immediate scope of negation. We show that this generalization falls out if these plural-agreeing phrases are treated in semantics as individual-denoting choice-functional indefinites and not as generalized quantifiers. Theoretically, we speculate that interpretable number features are in principle incompatible with generalized quantifier denotations.
For citation:
Ivlieva N. V., Podobryaev A. V. Making sense of variable number agreement in Russian. Voprosy Jazykoznanija, 2025, 1: 62–77.
Acknowledgements:
The results of the project “Crossmodular interaction in the grammatical theory: modeling grammatical features based on the data of the languages of Russia”, carried out within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University) in 2024, are presented in this work. We deeply thank all those who we consulted for judgments, and the audience of our FARL3 talk for their questions.