ИСТИНА

The paper discusses the status of lexical predicatives used in dative-impersonal structures in two neighbor Slavic languages, Russian and Ukrainian. Both languages have large classes of non-agreeing nominal forms which are used as Stage-level predicates and denote state of affairs that cannot be interpreted as a direct result of any process or activity, cf. Ukr. Meni sumno “I feel sad”, Rus. mne grustno “the same”. Russian has 260-270 predicatives, which select a dative subject with the feature [+Animate], Ukrainian has 200-210 predicatives of this kind. The majority of predicatives in both languages have an –o-final and are derived from adjectival stems (cf. sumn-yj, grustn-yj). We argue that the ability to take a dative subject is a non-trivial feature in both languages: both Russian and Ukrainian have many adjectival stems from which no Stage-level form can be derived, cf. Rus. mne smeshno ‘it makes me laugh’, smeshn-oj adj. ‘funny, amusing’, but Rus. *mne smeshlivo, smechlivyj, adj. ‘X is easily amused’. Consequently, adjectival stems should be divided into a class permitting derivation of Stage-level predicates and a class banning it.