The Yiddish Subjective Resultative Construction Based on the Adverbial Participle : Convergences and Divergences with Co-Territorial Languages

This paper discusses an understudied construction in Yiddish, Polish and Russian, namely the subjective resultative construction based on the adverbial participle (AP). The semantic verb classes with subjective resultative meaning denote movements of the body or body parts, the arrangement of clothing and other objects close to the body, mental states and the human condition in general. In contrast to Russian, Yiddish and Polish both allow variation in conveying the subjective resultativity of mutative verbs: both the participle I and II or both imperfective and perfective adverbial participle respectively can be used. The major divergence between Yiddish and its co-territorial languages is the existence of a construction employed exclusively with intransitive mental verbs and specified for subjective resultativity, active voice and direct evidentiality in the latter languages.