4 - Syntax. Bi-nominative Sentences in Russian

Summary

Krasota – èto istina, a istina – èto krasota

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’

—John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Russian has a very frequent type of sentence, known as bi-nominative: Rim – stolica Italii lit. ‘Rome capital Italy's.’ In this connection, the following wellknown problem emerges: What is the syntactic subject and what is the syntactic predicate in such a sentence? The answer to this question, apparently simple, but in fact very tricky, lies in a semantic analysis of bi-nominative sentences.

Bi-nominative Sentences in Russian

A Russian bi-nominative sentence has a “kernel” consisting of two Noun Phrases in the nominative [= NP_nom], with or without an explicit form of the verb byt′ ‘be’ between them. In other words, both the syntactic subject and the syntactic predicative of a bi-nominative sentence are NP_noms:

1. (1) a. Moj syn_nominžener_nom lit. ‘My son engineer’ [= ‘My son is an engineer’].

2. b. Svoistvo_nom5 – sledstvie_nomsledujuščego fakta lit. ‘Property 5 corollary following fact's’ [= ‘Property 5 is a corollary of the following fact’].

3. c. Rim_nom – stolica_nomItalii lit. ‘Rome capital Italy's’ [= ‘Rome is Italy's capital’].

4. d. Èti ljudi_nom – naši druz′ja_nom lit. ‘These people our friends’ [= ‘These people are our friends’].

Such sentences, when they do not have an overt copula, are also known as “nominal sentences” (Rus. imennye predloženija).

The present discussion is based on the following crucial fact:

In Russian, a bi-nominative sentence [= BS] necessarily contains a finite form of the verb byt′: in cases where there is no overt verb form, a BS includes a zero wordform of byt′, this zero expressing the present indicative of ‘be’.