A long birth: The development of gender-specific paucal constructions in Russian
Permanent lenke
https://hdl.handle.net/10037/20212Dato
2020-08-03Type
Journal articleTidsskriftartikkel
Peer reviewed
Forfatter
Nesset, ToreSammendrag
This article investigates the diachronic development of Russian numeral constructions consisting of a paucal numeral (dva “two”, tri “three”, četyre “four”) followed by an adjective and a noun. Based on statistical analysis of more than 6,000 corpus examples, it is shown that a split took place in the second half of the twentieth century when feminine nouns developed a dif- ferent agreement pattern from that of masculine and neuter nouns. This split is argued to represent the final step in a long “birth process” of gender- specific paucal constructions that started with the loss of the dual in the Middle Ages. It is suggested that we are witnessing a cascading effect, whereby the feminine pattern develops when the pattern for masculine and neuter nouns is approaching stabilization. The article furthermore includes a discussion of the hypothesis that “S-curves” represent a template for lan- guage change. While the documented changes resemble S-curves, the pro- posed analysis also addresses some general problems with testing the S- curve hypothesis empirically.
Forlag
John Benjamins PublishingSitering
Nesset t. A long birth: The development of gender-specific paucal constructions in Russian . Diachronica. 2020;37(4):514-539Metadata
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