Just Syntax?

Abstract

Summary According to the norms of the contemporary Russian standard language, the covert first argument of the adverbial participle (AP) has to be co-referential with the first argument of its matrix verb. However, other co-reference choices are a frequent phenomenon, as numerous publications both descriptive (Rappaport 1984; Jokojama 1984) and prescriptive (Ickovič 1982; Glovinskaja 2000) testify. Since the reasons for these divergent co-reference choices have been insufficiently addressed so far, we conducted an experiment that tested the influence of linguistic and sociodemographic factors on the co-reference choices. The linguistic factors tested are sentence semantics, argument structure of the verb and linear syntactic order of adverbial participle and matrix clause. Since the adverbial participle has been subject to an intensive normativization process, we assume that the degree of the respondents’ familiarity with prescriptive language rules and the degree of their exposition to texts reflecting these rules influence respondents’ co-reference choices. Therefore, we also tested for sociodemographic factors reflecting these degrees, namely the status of Russian as primary or secondary language, age, gender and highest level of education attained. Our data suggest a contrast between actual language use, in which the co-referential ambiguity of APs is resolved by verb and sentence semantics and the syntactic position of the AP, and the normative rules of Russian grammaticography, which allow only for co-reference with the first argument of the matrix clause. Long-lasting exposure to highly normatized text registers show effect, as respondents with master’s degree or even higher levels of education significantly prefer co-reference with the first argument of the matrix clause even in ambiguous contexts. The paper is structured as follows: The first section gives a survey of the divergent co-reference choices discussed in the literature and identifies linguistic factors hypothesized to influence a speaker’s choice. Section 2 discusses possible sociolinguistic factors affecting the co-reference choice. How these two types of factors are considered in the design of our experiment as well as participant sampling is described in section 3. In section 4 we apply logistic regression to our data and discuss its results, to be followed by the conclusions in section 5.