Complementation Strategies Of Russian Verbs Of Request

This paper describes the competition of complementation strategies of Russian verbs of request. We conducted a corpus-based study of six strategies of compelement encoding: infinitive, nominalisation, prepositional phrase with nominalisation, finite clause introduced with complementizer ctoby, non-finite clause introduced with complementizer ctoby (i.e. ctoby + infinitive), prepositional phrase with ctoby and expletive pronoun to (o tom ctoby). The results suggest that there are several factors influencing the competition under consideration (such as coreference of different participants, request dictance, etc.) and that these factors belong to different language domains, including semantics. This challenges the classic point of view according to which complementation studies should be focused primarily on syntax