Profiling of the Locative Participant as the Basis of Lexical Oppositions

Locative participant is а notion subsuming a wide range of semantic participants, which have in common the idea of spatial orientation: GOAL, SOURCE, LOCATION, PLACE, DIRECTION, TARGET. These participants can be expressed in a prepositional phrase (Rus. pojeхat’ v Avstraliju — go to Australia), as a direct object (Rus. posetit’ Avstraliju — visit Australia) or they might be obligatorily omitted (Rus. *promaхnut’s’a v medved’a — miss a bear (while shooting)). The profiling of a participant is a configuration whereby the participant is expressed as a direct object. Three strategies of profiling of a locative participant can be distinguished: 1. A derivational marker changes the valence pattern of the verb so that the locative participant is possibly or necessarily expressed as a direct object 2. A verb that cannot express the locative participant as a direct object has a pseudo-synonym that expresses the said participant as a direct object. 3. The verb has different valence patterns one of which expresses the locative participant as a direct object . During the analysis of the verbal semantic fields with locative participants, different strategies of expression thereof were considered, as well as the influence of the type of locative participant and the semantics of the situation on the means of argument marking. The effects of the GOAL–SOURCE asymmetry were discovered at the level of morphological derivation, and new arguments in favor of the scalar nature of the argument-adjunct distinction. The main contribution of the study are the description of the variety of locative participant marking in Russian and a tentative scale of locative participant significance (profiling frequency).