VALENCY STRUCTURE OF CERTAIN PREDICATES OF SPEECH: NEW FINDINGS

The paper discusses valency frames of a number of Russian verbal predicates whose semantics includes speech acts and, at a cetrain step of semantic decomposition, the negation, like vozražat’ ‘object, retort’, vozmuščat’sja ‘resent, be indignant’ or izvinjat’sja ‘apologize’. It is hypothesized that the frames of such predicates include a pair of propositional valencies distinctly opposed to each other: (1) the valency of stimulus that expresses the state of events and (2) the valency of response that introduces a speech act performed by the subject as a reaction to this state of event and offering an explanation. For example, in the sentence Ivan izvinilsja, čto ne prišel na moj den’ rożdenija ‘Ivan apologized that he did not come to my birthday party’ the clause starting with čto ‘that’ represents the state of events, whilst in the sentence Ivan izvinilsja, čto ploxo sebja čuvstvoval ‘Ivan apologized that he was not feeling well’ the čto-clause introduces Ivan’s response to the stimulus (e.g. of not coming to the birthday party). It is shown that these valencies cannot be adequately described with a single semantic role of content. The authors also give a generalization of this phenomenon, comparing it to other instances of valency pairs, and suggest the existence of predicates having two valency centers.