The grammatical and semantic properties of the Russian sentence type Včera mne legko rabotalos’

The goal of this article is to present the grammatical and semantic characteristics of Russian sentences such as Včera mne legko rabotalos’, found especially in the spoken language. The article consists of two parts: in the first we describe the formal properties of the three basic components of the sentence, considered as a clause: the characteristics of the dative subject, of the verb (typically intransitive) and of the adverb. We demonstrate that the reflexive particle is the syntactic element that binds the other components together. In the second section we present the properties of the same construction from the point of view of its lexical and semantic components, particularly of the verb, and we show that its use also depends on the contest in which the sentence is used and on pragmatic circumstances.