THE ROLE OF THE VERB IN RUSSIAN LINGUISTICS

Whether or not Russian exhibits verb movement has been an issue of a long standing debate. Based on the experimental evidence from the grammaticality judgement experiment on adverb position, we show that the immediately postverbal adverb position is degraded in Russian, but is not ungrammatical as in English. Using the derivation by phase approach, we argue that the verb in Russian checks the verb feature of T through agreement, similar to English. This accounts for the high acceptability of immediately preverbal adverbs in Russian and in English. However, we propose that the word order of discourse-dependent sentences is determined through re-rearrangement in a post-syntactic component of grammar. As a result, flexible word order Russian allows immediately postverbal adverbs (with degraded acceptability), while fixed word order English rules out immediately postverbal adverbs.