ALETHIC MODALS AND DATIVE-INFINITIVE STRUCTURES A. Zimmerling Puskhin State Russian Language Institute, Institute of Linguistics, RAS fagraey64@hotmail.com I discuss the meaning of the Russian dative-infinitive construction and argue that it expresses a single kind of modality in indicative sentences, notably — alethic modality. There is no need to split this construction in the indicative mood and ascribe different categorical meanings to its varieties. Keywords: modality, dative-infinitive structures, predicatives, Russian 1. Semantics-to-grammar interface Russian is one of the few Slavic languages that preserved two productive dative patterns — dative-infinitive structures (DIS) NDAT — VINF, where the infinitive is a lexical head, and dative-predicative structures (DPS) NDAT — PRED (— VINF), where the optional infinitive is a complement of a non-verbal predicative (Zimmerling 2024). DIS sentences have a modal meaning, its definition being a matter of debate (Moore, Perlmutter 2000: 377; Fortuin 2007; Israeli 2013: 199), while DPS denote a variety of temporarily restricted situations including the situations where X must or can do something or needs something. The class of DPS predicatives contains the basic modals nado ‘must’ and nužno ‘needs’ (Laufer 2007). It is tempting to get a generalized dative sentence pattern for Russian, but all proposals to postulate the same piece of structure to DIS and DPS (Sigurðsson 2002; Mitrenina 2017) run into trouble. For the first, the dative subject of DPS is obligatory animate, while the subject of DIS is not, cf. GruzovikamDAT zdes’ ne proexat’INF ‘Trucks can’t get through here’. For the second, the dative case is assigned structurally in Russian non-finite clauses including DIS, while in finite DPS clauses it is assigned lexically: some predicatives select dative subjects and some do not (Zimmerling 2020). For the third, DIS subjects are raised, while obligatory animate DPS subjects are syntactic and semantic arguments of the matrix clause predicatives, and there are no framework-external reasons to treat them as raised. Selectional restrictions, such as the animacy constraint, are characteristic of syntactic control, which holds for Russian (Lyutikova 2022).