Raising doubts about Russian impersonals

Abstract

The Russian data presented in Perlmutter and Moore (2002) seem to call into question the standard analysis of raising within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG): In Russian, the case marking of the raising target and raising pivot does not seem to be shared. In this paper, we show that the phenomena described by Perlmutter and Moore can receive another analysis, fully compatible with HPSG's theory of raising. We argue in addition that our account leads to a slightly simpler model of the Russian data than Perlmutter and Moore's. Crucially, our analysis is only available if we avail ourselves of a rich network of language-specific constructional schemata, a stance recently advocated within HPSG, following the lead of Construction Grammar.