Towards a syntactic analysis of Russian -sja

摘要

This paper presents a unifying analysis of the uses of the Russian marker -sja in passives, anticausatives and antipassives. The analysis is couched in terms of Distributed Morphology and does not assume any argument structure on roots, i.e. all arguments are licensed by functional heads. The main proposal that is put forward is that -sja is a head that fulfils two tasks in a derivation: in syntax, it saturates a selectional feature on an argument-introducing head, in semantics, it existentially quantifies over an unsaturated argument variable.