FASL 26, ###-### Michigan Slavic Publications 2018 Two Types of Verb Fronting in Russian * Maria Esipova New York University Russian has two types of verb fronting with doubling: when the fronted verb is an infinitive, and when it is fully inflected. I explore the semantic differences between the two types of verb fronting, previously ignored in the literature, and argue that in uninflected verb fronting the fronted constituent is semantically a predicate, while in inflected verb fronting it’s an assertion. Syntactically, thus, the two fronted constituents differ in size: it is the largest Aspect Phrase in uninflected verb fronting and a (Speech) Act Phrase with its complement elided in inflected verb fronting. 1 Introduction Verb fronting with doubling (VF) is a common phenomenon cross- linguistically (Cable 2004, Landau 2006, Kandybowicz 2007, a.o.). Russian has two types of VF: in the first one the fronted verb is an infinitive (uninflected verb fronting, UVF) while in the second one the fronted verb is fully inflected (inflected verb fronting, IVF): * For discussions and feedback at different stages of this project I would like to thank Mark Baltin, Stephanie Harves, David Pesetsky, Philippe Schlenker, Anna Szabolcsi, the audience at FASL 26, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for the FASL 26 proceedings. I’m also grateful to all my numerous Russian speaking consultants.