Abstract
The paper discusses case concord in Russian appositional constructions, which manifests itself in optional case concord of the proper name (v rek-eLOC Don-eLOC/ v rek-eLOC DonNOM ‘in the river Don’). The study provides an in-depth corpus analysis of more than 15,000 examples, using a logistic regression statistical model to predict the choice between presence and absence of concord. The results indicate concord is most likely to occur in constructions with structurally simple and frequent proper names that exhibit adjectival properties and match the common noun in grammatical gender. Proper names with the Goal semantic role show concord with a higher probability than proper names with other roles. It is proposed that all relevant factors refer to frequency or convenience. A diachronic investigation shows that concord has become a much less preferred option over time. It is argued that concord is of low functional significance, therefore its gradual loss over time is expected.
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Data Availability
All data and R-code which formed the basis of the results presented in this article are available at: https://github.com/natalielo009/Concord_apposition_2024.
Notes
The term “concord” is used here instead of the widely accepted term “agreement” to avoid terminological ambiguity (Corbett, 2006, p. 6), as “agreement” is frequently reserved for predicate-argument feature sharing. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of case feature sharing between the controller and the target is not a classical manifestation of concord, as case (unlike gender and number) is not a semantic or formal feature of the noun. Rather, cases are modelled to be imposed on the whole NP by government of some other element (predicate or adposition). There is therefore no reason to treat the nominal head as a controller in the concord relationship (Corbett, 2006, pp. 133-135; Testelec, 2001, p. 384). However, since currently there is no better terminology available, I will use the term “concord” in the present paper.
The list was taken from Wikipedia, https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Список_городов_России The top of the frequency list is provided in Table i.
Although the word kerosine ‘kerosene’ is not capitalized in Russian (and capitalization is in fact the only criterion of properhood from the point of view of classical grammar), it participates in an appositive construction with the same properties as usual capitalized names. For example, in modern language it allows for optional concord. If one considers the distributive criterion (the ability to participate in an appositive construction as a second member), then kerosine is not different from any other proper name (for more detail about the properhood criteria for modern Russian, see (Logvinova, forthcomming)).
Stratification into the six time periods was applied for data collection to sample representative number of examples for each diachronic period, since otherwise the concordance result in RNC and is skewed towards later texts. It was also essential to avoid the download limitations of RNC, which at the time when the data were collected did not allowed the researcher to download all the relevant examples. It was therefore necessary to carry out several searches for different time periods.
Cramer’s V measures how strongly the considered categorical variables are associated. Results below 0.1 are traditionally considered not reportable (Corder & Foreman, 2009, p. 173).
Levshina (2015, p. 160) suggests that VIF-scores should not be greater than 10.
An anonymous reviewer of Russian linguistics suggests that there might be alternative explanations for the loss of morphological marking in close appositional constructions in Russian. Although there has been discussion of analyticity growth in Russian of Soviet times in literature (Comrie & Stone, 1978; Dunn, 1988), Russian nominal inflection has never been observed to be compromised. Especially there are no obvious reasons for it to disappear in such a marginal domain of grammar as close apposition. So there are no strong and provable reasons to believe that the loss of agreement could have happened due to the general tendency to refuse nominal inflection in Russian. Turning to the typology, one can notice that the only discussed cases of concord loss are those of gender concord (probably, due to the general rarity of case concord (Norris, 2019)). The factors that are usually described in the literature regarding this phenomenon are either (1) the morphological erosion of the corresponding inflectional morphemes or (2) redistribution of concord when one value becomes unmarked and spreads all over the system. Even if one prefers to ignore all the differences between case and gender as concord features, these explanations are cannot be considered in relation to the phenomenon under discussion in the present paper since these hypothesis are not confirmed by the data.
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Acknowledgements
This work/article is an output of a research project implemented as part of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University).
The author of this paper expresses immense gratitude to her mentors, Maria Kholodilova and Tore Nesset. Without Maria Kholodilova’s generous help from 2017 and beyond, this work would not be here. Without Tore Nesset’s empathetic and scrutinuous guidance, it would never have reached a level that I can be proud of. I am deeply grateful to them for being with me through the years despite all life’s trials.
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Logvinova, N. Concord in Russian close appositional constructions: a quantitative study. Russ Linguist 48, 4 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-024-09288-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-024-09288-1