Aspects of Deficient v in Russian

A common assumption about the nature of unaccusative verbs is that they regularly lack the external argument. A number of Slavic languages possess a decausative derivation, which turns transitive predicates into unaccusatives. Moreover, the decausative derivation is usually restricted to a subclass of transitive verbs. In this paper we examine three classes of verbs in Russian: transitives which allow for decausativization (‘Transitives 1 ’ or T1-verbs), transitives which never undergo decausativiation (‘Transitives 2 ’ or T2-verbs), and unaccusatives. We give an account for regular distinctions between the behavior of the three classes partly in terms of aspectual compositional semantics and partly in terms of syntactic restrictions. Consider the distinctions between the three verb classes illustrated in (1). The availability of the bare unaccusative construction (where the verb lacks valency-decreasing morphology, as well as the external argument, and the internal one turns up as subject) and of the s’a-decausative construction distinguishes the three classes of verbs. First, let us consider the distinction between the two classes of transitives. Here the crucial data comes from the aspectual interpretation of Russian past passive participles (PPPs), exemplified in (2). The T1-verbs in (2a) allow for the ambiguity between an eventive and a stative reading, while T2