Ètogo Mne Ne Ponjatʼ ‘I Cannot Understand This’: A Discontinuous Idiom
- Authors: Mel’čuk I.A.1,2
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Affiliations:
- Observatoire de linguistique Sens-Texte
- C.P. 6128, succursale Centre-ville, Montréal
- Issue: Vol 84, No 4 (2025)
- Pages: 5-16
- Section: Articles
- URL: https://journal-vniispk.ru/1605-7880/article/view/322635
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.31857/S1605788025040012
- ID: 322635
Abstract
Аn utterance of the form “NDATBYTʼ NE VINF” (Mne ne (po)guljatʼ po Parižu ‘It is impossible that I go for walks in Paris’) contains a verb in the infinitive that syntactically depends on the verb BYTʼ ‘be’.Such utterances present in fact two different constructions: one with an infinitive in the perfective aspect, and another one with an infinitive in the imperfective aspect. These constructions implement two idioms: [X-u] ˹BYTʼ … NE˺11 [Y-nutʼ] ‘It is/was/will be impossible that X has done Y’ and [X-u] ˹BYTʼ … NE˺12 [Y-atʼ] ‘It will be impossible that X does Y’. Both idioms are syntactically discontinuous (their lexical components are not syntactically linked). The paper describes two illustrative sentences that contain these idioms, giving and discussing their formal representations on the semantic, deep-syntactic and surface-syntactic levels; it also presents the lexical entries for both idioms with detailed linguistic comments.
About the authors
I. A. Mel’čuk
Observatoire de linguistique Sens-Texte; C.P. 6128, succursale Centre-ville, Montréal
Author for correspondence.
Email: igor.melcuk@umontreal.ca
Université de Montréal, Montréal.; Montreal, H3C 3J7, Canada
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