THE RUSSIAN CONSTRUCTION CHTO X, CHTO Y: ISSUES IN ITS SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS

Abstract

The Russian coordinative construction chto X, chto Y ‘whether X or Y; both X and Y’ merits attention for several reasons: first, due to the absence of systematic corpus-based studies of its use; second, due to the lack of clarity as to the composition of its meaning from those of its parts, including chto itself, which has a multitude of uses in Russian; and finally, due to the complexity of the relations between the multiple uses of chto. This paper undertakes a quantitative study of the construction in the main corpus of the Russian National Corpus, establishing the emergence of purely conjunctive uses on a par with pre-existing free choice uses and embedded alternative question uses, which appear to be going out of use. Further, I interpret free choice uses as an instance of the unconditional (concessive conditional) construction known from the literature to be segmented into two clausal parts and to involve no overt conditional complementiser, just as Russian uses in question behave. Basing on this observation, I suggest that the three kinds of uses share the same semantics of the construction, i. e. the alternative set {X, Y}, and show how the meanings of three requisite types can be derived from it. Finally, the connection between chto and alternative set formation calls for a new look on the relation between pronominal and complementiser uses of chto where the emergence of the latter is mediated by a stage at which the pronominal chto occupies a projection associated with clausal polarity. Refs 20.