name, title: 
  Bozena Cetnarowska, Dr and Helen Trugman
title of the paper: 
  "ON PASSIVE NOMINALS IN POLISH AND RUSSIAN"
affiliation: 
  University of Silesia (Cetnarowska), Tel-Aviv University (Trugman)


ON PASSIVE NOMINALS IN POLISH AND RUSSIAN 

The present paper compares the occurrence and properties of the so-called 'passive' nominals 
in Polish and Russian. These nominals, which appear to be equivalents of passive clauses, 
contain objective possessives, i.e. prenominal possessives denoting the Theme/Patient 
argument of the corresponding verbal predicates. Such 'passive' nominals are illustrated in (2) 
below and their 'active' counterparts are given in (1).

(1)	Polish	zwolnienie 	go		z	pracy
		dismissing	him.gen	from	job
		'dismissing him from (his) job'
	Russian	uvol'nenie	ego		s 	raboty
		dismissing	him.gen	from 	work
'dismissing him from work'

(2)	Polish	jego			zwolnienie	z	pracy
		his.poss/him.gen	dismissing	from	job
		'his dismissal from (his) job'
	Russian	ego			uvol'nenie	s 	raboty
		his.poss/him.gen	dismissing	from 	work
		'his dismissal from work'

In this paper we will examine the binding and control abilities of passive nominals (as 
discussed for Polish and Russian in Rappaport (1998), Rozwadowska (1995) and Willim 
(1989)) in order to see if the external (agent) argument is syntactically active. Furthermore, we 
will challenge Shoorlemmer's (1998a) claim that such nominals belong to the category of 
Simple Event Nominals and show that passive nominals in both languages are a subset of 
Complex Event Nominals exhibiting distinct behavior and thus failing some of Grimshaw's 
diagnostics for eventivity. This treatment of passive nominals will be also compared to 
Snyder's (1998) approach to English passive nominals as exhibiting the proposition reading 
and denoting the culmination of an underlying event.
Finally, we will discuss plausible mechanisms for associating the prenominal possessives in 
(2) with the thematic role of Theme/Patient. The prenominal possessives will be regarded as 
real arguments of the underlying verbal predicate in consonance with Longobardi (2000), 
Rappaport (1998), and Trugman (2000), but in contrast to Grimshaw (1990), Rozwadowska  
(1997) and Willim (1999). In particular, the hypothesis formulated in Trugman (1999, 2000) 
for Russian nominals will be considered, and its plausibility for Polish will be tested. In 
addition, we will attempt to provide a uniform account of passive nominals in Polish, Russian 
and English, which is anchored to the proposal in Doron and Rappaport-Hovav (1991) that 
internal arguments in passive nominals undergo lexical externalization. 

References:

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of NELS 21: 81-94.
Grimshaw, J. (1990) Argument Structure. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
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