Das russische Demonstrativpronomen eto (‘dasʼ) in der Kopula-Stellung: Probleme des syntaktischen Status im Licht der funktionalen Grammatik

Summary The demonstrative pronoun eto (‘this’) in copula position: problems of its syntactic status from the perspective of functional grammar.This article deals with the syntactic status of the Russian demonstrative pronoun ‘eto’ in the copula position. The authors present the concept dominant in the Russian grammatical tradition that the pronoun in such sentences is equivalent to an auxiliary verb and performs a copulative function. The main part of the article is devoted to a critical analysis of such treatment, taking into account several aspects: function, distribution, position, intonation, substitution, semantics and others. The authors provide evidence for the thesis that the demonstrative pronoun in sentences of this type is one of the two exponents of the duplicative construction N-Pron, which occupies the position of the actant-subject, depending on the zeroed verb predicate, and besides, it anaphorically refers to the noun in preposition (which in turn has the status of a parenthetical element). Characteristics of sentences of this type are discussed in a comparative way, with reference to other European languages.