The indeterminate-personal clause in Russian: A systemic functional analysis

This dissertation presents a systemic functional analysis of the indeterminate-personal (IP) clause in Contemporary Standard Russian. The classification of the indeterminate-personal clause has been a recurring issue in syntactic taxonomies of the Russian language within the Russian grammatical tradition, but this clause has received scant attention among American Slavic linguists. This neglect is due to the predominant underlying theoretical assumptions of formally-based approaches to Russian syntax.;Chapter 3 presents the cognitive underpinnings of functional role assignment within the experiential structure of a clause. The concept of roles, or microfunctions, in experiential structure is based upon a construal semantics advocated by Cognitive Grammar. The cognitive basis of participant roles is essential to demonstrate that the grammatical coding of a conceived situation is determined by the construal of that situation; that is, the choice to encode a certain conceived situation as an IP clause relates directly to the construal of that situation. The two issues most relevant to a treatment of the IP clause are examined in detail: the distinction between participant vs. circumstantial roles and the characterization of covert participant roles.;Chapter 4 is devoted to an in-depth presentation of the internal structure of the transitivity system network, the network responsible for the selection of process type. Process types are divided into four general classes: material, mental, verbal, and relational.;Chapter 5 presents a detailed analysis of the IP clause within the transitivity system network in order to determine which process types are capable of being instantiated by an IP clause and which are not.;In Chapter 2 I present the evolution of the treatment of the IP clause in syntactic taxonomies emphasizing how the fact that the status of the IP clause in such treatments is a function of the fundamental theoretical assumptions of the linguistic models employed. The two related theoretical premises bearing most directly on the IP clause are (1) the existence of empty categories and (2) the nature of subject-predicate agreement.;I explore the IP clause in the interpersonal functional component of the clause system network in Chapter 6.;Chapter 7 summarizes the results. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...