Lexical and Grammatical Environment and Its Influence on the Noun Case Form in Russian Language

Abstract

This article is devoted to a new phenomenon in modern Russian language. Earlier, a native speaker of Russian chose a noun case form depending on the “requirements” of the grammatically dominant word. Nowadays, more and more often, a native speaker chooses a noun case taking into account the influence of several words included in its lexical and grammatical environment. The article discusses in detail all the potential elements of the lexical and grammatical environment of a noun that can influence on the choice of its case form, and provides facts of their consolidated or contradictory influence, which creates a choice problem. The lexical and grammatical environment of a noun potentially includes a controlling word, homogeneous terms of a sentence and generalizing word for them, a preposition that can be combined with several case forms, an adjective, participle or number dependent on the noun, as well as other nouns nearby. Each of the elements of the environment influences the choice of case in its own way, so the speaker often chooses a case form incorrectly. The phenomenon illustrates the antinomy of language: 1) being singled out as part of a syntagm, a linguistic expression seeks to expand its existence at the expense of other linguistic expressions; 2) being singled out as part of a syntagm, a linguistic expression is subjected to pressure from neighboring linguistic expressions.