• Russian Language and Literature
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• no.61
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• pp.89-112
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• 2018

This paper deals with pronoun doubling construction commonly attested in Colloquial Russian. The doubling phenomena in general are observed among various languages and in various levels of language. The Russian pronoun doubling construction is composed of a lexical noun, whether argument or adjunct, that is attracted to a sentence initial position with a pronoun copy immediately following it. The pronominal copy bears the identical case. From the semantic side, the fronted noun-pronoun phrase forms a topic, and often elicits the reading of predicate with permanent property. After Sirotinina(1974)'s observation, such aspectual restriction has been widely accepted in the scholarship, and was reinterpreted by McKoy (1998, 2003) as the distinction Individual-level vs. Stage-level predicates in terms of Milsark (1974) and Carlson (1977). I argue that such an aspectual interpretation or restriction is not derived from at the construction level, but is epiphenomenal to the small clause, which lies at the bottom of derivation. And I propose that the small-clause based structure is derived by the Generic Topic Operator, which is base generated at Spec, TP. With these two theoretical apparatuses, idiosyncratic properties both in syntax and semantics of the construction can be effectively accounted for.