Abstract
Paucal constructions represent a specific sub-area in the grammar of Russian in which a kind of morphosyntactic variation can be found that is unattested elsewhere in the language. This variation occurs in some animate paucal constructions especially when these are in the direct object function. In this position, these constructions can be assigned either the genitive-accusative case (that is, the animate form), as would be expected given their semantics, or, alternatively, the nominative-accusative case, as with inanimate paucal constructions. This paper explores several aspects of this variability, focusing mainly on the statistical correlations of the competing forms, their implications for the Animacy Hierarchy, and their diachronic evolution. The evidence at hand points to the interaction of semantic (animacy, individuation, modality) and formal (gender, inflectional class) factors on the selection of one or the other form.
Аннотация
Так называемые паукальные конструкции (или конструкции с малыми числительными) отличаются тем, что допускают уникальные в грамматике русского языка морфосинтаксические варианты. Эти варианты проявляют себя в некоторых паукальных одушевленных конструкциях, особенно в функции прямого объекта. В данной позиции одушевленные паукальные конструкции могут быть маркированы либо родительным-винительным падежом (формой, соответствующей собственно одушевленным объектам), либо именительным-винительным падежом (формой, характерной для неодушевленных объектов). В этой статье рассматриваются особенности названной вариативности, при этом уделяется внимание статистическому анализу употребления конкурирующих форм, их диахронической эволюции, а также их импликациям для иерархии одушевленности. Мы доказываем, что выбор той или иной словоформы обусловливается взаимосвязью различных семантических (одушевленность, индивидуация, модальность) и формальных факторов (грамматический род, словоизменительный класс).
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Notes
Throughout the paper, the term ‘paucal’ will refer primarily to low numerals as specified in Sect. 1. Hence the possibility of using the plural form ‘paucals’. But ‘paucal’ is also a value of the number feature (Corbett 2000, p. 22), which, on certain accounts, has some bearing on the analysis of numeral constructions containing low numerals in Russian (even though general paucal as a value of number and the limited paucal form of such constructions are of course not coextensive). We will refer to the particular forms of nouns in these numeral phrases by using the term ‘paucal morphology’.
The issue of the choice of case when an adjective is inserted in a numeral expression is quite a specific matter, and we will leave it aside, because it is not relevant to the phenomenon under study here.
See also the data contained in the Surrey Short Term Morphosyntactic Change Databases (Krasovitsky et al. 2009) in: http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/stmc/two-three-four/ (2 September 2016).
These are instances of what can be called the Extended Animacy Hierarchy, which includes not only pure semantic animacy, but also a feature like person and, in the case of kin terms, a distinction that has more to do with such notions as empathy, specificity, or individuation. As for the difference between the speaker (1st person) and the addressee (2nd person), some versions of the scale distinguish hierarchically between them, whereas others, on the basis of data from such linguistic systems as the Algonquian languages Plains Cree and Ojibwa (which seem to accord a higher status to 2nd person), prefer to treat them as hierarchically equal.
The nominal paradigms of the III feminine declension and all the neuter singular paradigms (I and III declension types), however, always have an accusative syncretic with the nominative form in the singular, regardless of their animacy features. Thus, the animate nouns mat’nom.f = mat’acc.f ‘mother’ (vs. materigen) or ditjanom.n = ditjaacc.n ‘child’ (vs. ditjatigen) behave in the same way as the inanimates ljubov’nom.f = ljubov’acc.f ‘love’ (vs. ljubvigen) or vremjanom.n = vremjaacc.n ‘time’ (vs. vremenigen). The non-syncretic paradigm, feminine and masculine singular nouns of the II declension class are also not affected by animacy when functioning as regular objects, as far as they display separate forms for each of the relevant cases: mamanom vs. mamuacc vs. mamygen (feminine) or papanom vs. papuacc vs. papygen (masculine).
Of course, in the event that the nouns in (iii) are taken as inanimate, in their direct original meaning, case marking remains as usual, accusative-nominative, e.g. včera ja ispekla koloboknom/acc.sg ‘yesterday I cooked a round bread’.
In this respect, we disagree with the opinion expressed by Mikaelian (2013, p. 89) in her work on cardinals and animacy in Russian that direct objects with paucals behave in a similar way to regular non-paucal objects with respect to the Animacy Hierarchy.
Namely, a similar effect of lowering the individuation level triggered by cardinals is observed in quantified NPs in subject function; see Madariaga and Igartua (2017) and references therein.
Other authors, following Isačenko (1962, p. 536) and Zaliznjak (2002, pp. 47–48), prefer to interpret it as an ‘adnumerative’ form (Mel’čuk 1986, pp. 56, 61). Whether it can be incorporated (as a full member) into the Russian case paradigm is a different matter (see Corbett 2008, pp. 22–23, 2012, pp. 209–210).
We cannot agree with Ljutikova’s (2017, p. 309ff.) observation about the case status of the animate direct objects under study: according to her, these objects are syntactically caseless. While we agree that subject non-agreeing QPs can be syntactically caseless, the extension of this analysis to objects seems highly unlikely: (i) from a diachronic point of view, animate object NPs initially showed the same morphology as inanimate objects, and it would be odd to affirm that every inanimate object is / was at some point not syntactically accusative in Russian; nominative-accusative was historically the case of all direct objects, and the alternations observed in animate objects are just the reflect of the progressive introduction of the animacy feature in the morphological system of objects; (ii) in the case of subjects, including quantified subjects, the animacy feature was never introduced and no morphological case alternation can be observed; alternations in verbal agreement developed independently from case marking on objects and must therefore correspond to a different motivation.
Plotnikova (1980) mentions as an exception to this rule the words suščestvo ‘creature, living being’ and kukla ‘doll’, but these two words fluctuate in the Animacy Hierarchy even if used without a paucal numeral (see Sect. 2). On the other hand, there are many other words that undergo case alternation when combined with paucals, as we will see later on in this section.
Our Russian consultants differ in this respect: some characterize the nominative-accusative variant in these contexts as old-fashioned, some as extremely colloquial (see already Vinogradov 1972, p. 249), and some just refer to it as non-normative or marginal without venturing to give any further stylistic characterization of it.
Surprisingly for us, Mikaelian (2013, p. 86) claims that the nominative-accusative forms under study here are absent in the Russian National Corpus, but we have found a good number of examples, which makes it possible to compare them to the corresponding genitive-accusative pattern, as we will show in this section.
The examples we have are mostly found in older texts (although the two last examples are found in a text by Brežnev, cf. example 10 above, and a journalistic text from 1991). Except for this, we cannot find a single example in the Corpus later than ca. 1930. This seems to confirm Krys’ko’s (1994, p. 142) description of this pattern as completely old-fashioned nowadays. Recall that the Academy Grammar did not even mention the use of this case pattern on masculine NPs.
The search for the paucal obe renders an almost null rate of nominative-accusative instances (only 1 example vs. 99 of genitive-accusative), which evidences its rather independent evolution. In this respect, it is worth pointing out that oba / obe differs crucially from dva / dve in the stress pattern of the nominal forms that combine with them (of course when this accentual variation is available): cf. dva časá ‘two hours’ vs. oba čása ‘both hours’. If in the former case the difference between the paucal form časá and the genitive čása has been used as an argument in favor of the distinct morphology of the nominal form in paucal constructions, with oba there is no possibility for any such distinction.
In the case of the numeral ‘four’ in the 20th century, the percentages are almost the same as for ‘three’, but the occurrence of the numeral ‘four’ in the relevant context in the 20th-century texts collected in the Corpus is probably too low to extract reliable conclusions about it.
Interestingly, there is a similar effect of the quantifier on predicate agreement, as demonstrated by Corbett (1983, pp. 221–223, 2000, p. 215). In predicate constructions, the likelihood of singular agreement increases as the numeral becomes larger (and here too, the contrast is clearer between 2, on the one hand, and 3–4, on the other).
In our sample, the feminine words lošad’ ‘horse’, ovca ‘sheep’, korova ‘cow’, kurica ‘hen’, koza ‘goat’, sobaka ‘dog’, and the masculine kon’ ‘horse’, byk ‘bull’, telec ‘bull calf’, žerebec ‘colt’, gus’ ‘goose’, undergo nominative-accusative marking with paucal in a similar proportion to Grannes’s ‘small animals’ (incidentally, domestic animals clearly outnumber small animals in quantity of occurrences).
Incidentally, a search in the information service of the website gramota.ru renders three queries about the variants in compound numerals with paucals (the same query with pure paucals is absent from the database). The answers to those queries are inconsistent with one other: while all the answers characterize the nominative variant as normative, the first of them (No. 203076) considers the genitive variant as literary, archaic, but the answers to the other two queries (No. 265353, No. 280405) claim that the genitive variant is colloquial (www.gramota.ru last accessed: February 25, 2016). The same hesitation in characterizing the non-normative variant is found in the speakers’ intuitions and descriptive grammars with regard to simple paucals (cf. Section 4.1): most speakers find the nominative-accusative variant colloquial; while descriptive grammars (Plotnikova 1980, pp. 573–574; Krys’ko 1994, p. 142) characterize it, probably conforming to their real historical development, as archaic and old-fashioned. Vinogradov (1972, p. 249) attributed the nominative-accusative form in paucal constructions like ja videl dve korovy ‘I saw [two cows]nom/acc.sg.f’ to the influence of compound numerals, but the historical evidence rather suggests the converse direction of influence.
Only two examples are real attributives: dve ranenyx lošadi ‘two wounded horses’ and tri statnye lošadi ‘three graceful horses’. They are both old, though: the first one is from 1913 and is part of a listing of wounded, healthy, and dead animals after a battle, while the second example is the oldest example in the sample (from 1825).
The questionnaire contained several sentences with paucal constructions, including both animate and inanimate objects.
The fact that the Russian contrast in based on individuation solely, while in Mi’kmaq the semantic opposition ‘mass vs. count’ plays a crucial role, explains the most salient difference between the two systems: unlike in our case, in which there is a contrast between case marking in compound and non-compound paucals, in Mi’kmaq, numerals morphologically built from 1–5, as simple paucals, also lack the classifier.
By contrast, a scale according to the type of verb and construction (as in e.g. Mikaelian 2013, p. 89: telic > perceptional (atelic) > the verb imet’ ‘to have’ > quantificational constructions including transitive verbs and prepositional phrases with quantitative semantics) does not give any reliable result, as there are examples of all of them and, apparently at least, no clear preferences.
In this paper, we disregard this kind of non-referential animate prepositional expression for several reasons. First, they seem to have developed in a quite independent way as compared to direct objects: their lack of referentiality stems directly from the intrinsic lexical meaning of the preposition, unlike objects, which need a ‘higher’ feature, namely some sort of modality on the verb in order to be interpreted as non-referential. Besides, as we show in this section, not only did non-referential objects preserve the old nominative-accusative pattern, but some referential QP did as well, when the right conditions are involved. It is just that, in the case of objects, non-referentiality is one of the features that make paucal expressions diachronically more ‘resistant’ to animacy, but this observation cannot be applied to some prepositional expressions, at least those which are intrinsically non-referential, and therefore animacy never affected them, i.e. they are just ungrammatical if the genitive-accusative case is used. This is in general the case of what Pereltsvaig (2006) refers to as ‘Small PPs’, parallel to her Small Nominals, among which she includes some of these PPs, such as vybrat’ v prezidenty ‘choose as president’, po dva čeloveka ‘two persons each’, etc.
There seems to be some confusion in the literature on Russian quantifying expressions regarding the term ‘individuation’. Pereltsvaig (2006), for example, uses the terms ‘non-individuated’ and ‘non-referential’ in an indistinctive way (she talks of ‘individual reference’ or ‘non-group interpretation’), and characterizes v fil’me igralo pjat’ izvestnyx akterov ‘five famous actors (i.e. ‘non-individuated’, taken as a group) played in the film’ as non-referential QP subjects. Mikaelian (2013, p. 88), following Mel’čuk (1985, p. 445), considers not only expressions like nomer na [dva čeloveka]nom/acc.m ‘a room for two people’, \(po\) [tri studenta]nom/acc.m ‘three students (e.g. per class)’, but also direct objects like im privodili každyj den’ tri-četyre korovy ‘every day, they were brought three or four cows’ to be non-referential. We will not consider examples like the last one or Pereltsvaig’s as non-referential; the quantified expression there can be unspecific or non-individuated (a group), but the cows and actors are certainly referential, they bear a referential index as in the sense put forward by i.a. Baker (2003), even if we do not know the identity of that index. This distinction is found in other parts of the Russian grammar, namely in indefinite pronouns, which, being all indefinite, mark elements bearing a referential index (whose identity someone ignores: the -to and koe- series) and those really lacking a reference (the -nibud’ series) in a distinct way. Accordingly, we use the term ‘non-referential’ only for those expressions that do not bear a referential index, like the prepositional expressions above.
Despite these facts, Krys’ko (1994, pp. 21−52) believes that there is no reason to recognize any kind of precedence in the rise of animacy, insofar as the genitive-accusative form was used with nouns denoting animals in the earliest texts (in the East Slavic tradition). But, unsurprisingly, he is forced to acknowledge that the frequency correlations of old and new accusative forms are not the same among human and animal nouns, even if he does not accord any particular relevance to this asymmetry (Krys’ko 1994, p. 51).
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We are deeply indebted to Xenia Semionova for her invaluable assistance with regards to the distribution of the questionnaire and her help compiling the statistics based on the answers received. Special thanks are due to her and Greville G. Corbett for useful suggestions and comments on an earlier draft of this article. We also want to thank Pavel Graschenkov and Vladimir Plungian for insightful discussion and help with the Russian data, as well as our informants Alexander Arkhipov, Maria Brykina, Natalia Zevakhina, and the 197 anonymous speakers that filled out our questionnaires. We are also grateful to the audience at the 11th Annual Meeting of the Slavic Linguistics Society, held in Toronto on 23–25 September 2016, and especially to Alan Timberlake, for helpful feedback. The research for the paper was made possible by the grants from the Spanish Ministry of the Economy and Competitiveness FFI2014-57260-P and FFI2014-53675-P. Support given by the research group on linguistics (UFI11/14) at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and the research group on historical linguistics (IT698-13) funded by the Basque Government is also gratefully acknowledged.
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Igartua, I., Madariaga, N. The interplay of semantic and formal factors in Russian morphosyntax: animate paucal constructions in direct object function. Russ Linguist 42, 27–55 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-017-9188-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-017-9188-y