A long birth
The development of gender-specific paucal constructions in Russian
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20344956 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tore Nesset (0000-0003-1308-3506, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 514-539 |
| Publication date | 2020-12-10 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Diachronica (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0176-4225 • E-ISSN: 1569-9714 |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1075/dia.18057.nes |
| OpenAlex | W3047194650 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 17 |
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 different 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 language change. While the documented changes resemble S-curves, the proposed analysis also addresses some general problems with testing the S-curve hypothesis empirically
Adjective · Agreement · Arithmetic · Linguistics · Noun · Numeral system · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Russian Case Morphology and the Syntactic Categories
How to do Linguistics with R
An introduction to recursive partitioning
On the History of Smaller Numerals
The Morphosyntax of the Numerals dva 'two', tri 'three', četyre 'four'
Making choices in Russian
The decade construction rivalry in Russian
Gender
Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change
Models, forests, and trees of York English
Die russische Sprache der Gegenwart
S-curves and the mechanisms of propagation in language change
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,6 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2024 (4) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |