Non-canonical constructions with reflexive possessives in Russian: u-possessor constructions

Our paper focuses on the Russian expression svoj. Many authors argue that it should be divided into two lexemes: a reflexive possessive that must be locally bound and an adjective. However, while some cases are clear, the others became a source of controversy. This problem has never been analyzed in a corpus study. In this paper, we examined a corpus sample of the sentences with nominative svoj. We showed that examples with external possessors with u-PPs are the most frequent in this set and analyzed them in more detail. Two types of such constructions with partly different properties are identified. In sum, we concluded that svoj does not occupy the syntactic position of the possessor in the NP and does not express a possessive relation semantically. Rather, it acts as a clause-level adjectival predicate, and its meaning is similar to that of the English different.