Mixed Agreement Patterns in Russian (Experimental Study)

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Absract: This paper addresses the issue of gender mismatch in Russian. In Russian there is a set of nouns that refer to humans denoting their position, profession, degree etc. and trigger masculine grammatical agreement, but that are also used for denoting female humans as far as they do not have a feminine parallel. When referring to women in nominative case they may trigger both masculine or feminine agreement and, as a consequence, gender mismatch may occur: constituents may demonstrate different values of the same feature. Using experimental data, I provide both synchronic and diachronic estimation of gender mismatch frequency in Russian. I estimate the current distribution of gender mismatch patterns for both attributive and predicate agreement. Then I compare recent data with statistical studies from mid-twentieth century and then discuss possible interpretations of the change in distribution of the patterns. In particular, I show that in 50 years the distribution of masculine and feminine agreement within verbs and high adjectives has significantly changed. For both attributives and predicates the percent of agreement with formal features of the noun has increased. I also show that the phenomenon of gender mismatch in Russian correlates with the referential domain in the syntactic structure.

Keywords: gender mismatch, mixed agreement, noun phrase, referential domain, experimental linguistics, Russian.

: Category: Vol 77, NO 1 (2018)

Pages: 65-71

Department: Materials and Notes

Author: Anastasia А. Gerasimova

Information about the author: Laboratory-Researcher at the Contemporary Linguistic Studies Institute of the Moscow Pedagogical State University, GSP-3, 11 Tverskaya Str., Moscow, 125993, Russia anastasiagerasimova432@gmail.com

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