We are happy to announce a talk by Nico Löffler (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.
Date: July 3, 2025
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: The Meaning of the Russian Instrumental Case
Abstract:
The instrumental case is probably the hardest case of the Russian language to be analysed semantically. Up to approximately 20 distinct uses have been assigned to it. Among them are the agent in passive constructions, a tool used in an action, a timeframe, and a property of an individual. It is this great variation in uses that makes it hard to give a concise formal analysis of the Russian instrumental.
In my Bachelor’s thesis, I subsume the uses of the Russian instrumental under two distinct semantic classes and provide a syntactic and semantic analysis of each class. To achieve this, I preclude semantically deviant uses, namely internal arguments, frame-setting adjuncts, and two particular uses with special constraints on usage. Some uses turn out to be purely structural, but the remaining uses are associated with one of two classes. In the first class, the nominal phrase in the instrumental case expresses a causal meaning. In the second class, the instrumental expresses a secondary predication over another subject or object referent.