BASE-GENERATED OR DERIVED? HERE'S HOW TO TELL STRUCTURES APART IN RUSSIAN.

The paper argues that the Scope Freezing Diagnostic (Antonyuk 2015; 2020) is an accurate test of relative argument relations and a reliable diagnostic for base-generated structures in Russian. An important novel finding reported here vP-internal permutation, Argument Inversion, mediated by Animacy, leading to promotion lower [+Animate] position c-commanding its co-argument. Crucially, such permutations are shown result order allows Focus projection, one widely perceived be discourse-neutral, hence routinely analyzed as underived. argued more than other syntactic tests proposed literature, well valuable overall, has helped uncover Animacy pervasive previously unrecognized confound on Information Structure complex interactions with structure Theoretical methodological implications our findings discussed.