1. Sentence comprehension test for Russian : a tool to assess syntactic competenceDaria Chernova, Artem Novozhilov, Natalia Slioussar, 2023, review article Abstract: Although all healthy adults have advanced syntactic processing abilities in their native language, psycholinguistic studies report extensive variation among them. However, very few tests were developed to assess this variation, presumably, because when adult native speakers focus on syntactic processing, not being distracted by other tasks, they usually reach ceiling performance. We developed a Sentence Comprehension Test for the Russian language aimed to fill this gap. The test captures variation among participants and does not show ceiling effects. The Sentence Comprehension Test includes 60 unambiguous grammatically complex sentences and 40 control sentences that are of the same length, but are syntactically simpler. Every sentence is accompanied by a comprehension question targeting potential syntactic processing problems and interpretation errors associated with them. Grammatically complex sentences were selected on the basis of the previous literature and then tested in a pilot study. As a result, six constructions that trigger the largest number of errors were identified. For these constructions, we also analyzed which ones are associated with the longest word-by-word reading times, question answering times and the highest error rates. These differences point to different sources of syntactic processing difficulties and can be relied upon in subsequent studies. We conducted two experiments to validate the final version of the test. Getting similar results in two independent experiments, as well as in two presentation modes (reading and listening modes are compared in Experiment 2) confirms its reliability. In Experiment 1, we also showed that the results of the test correlate with the scores in the verbal working memory span test. Keywords: syntax, comprehension, Russian language, psycholinguistics Published in RUNG: 05.04.2024; Views: 1274; Downloads: 6 Full text (1,03 MB) This document has many files! More... |
2. Gender variation in indeclinable inanimate nouns and gender markedness in modern RussianKirill Chuprinko, Varvara Magomedova, Natalia Slioussar, 2023, original scientific article Abstract: Abstract
In this paper, the results of a large web-corpus study on gender of Russian inanimate indeclinable common nouns are presented. In most cases, neuter is assigned to indeclinables as a default. However, morphophonological and semantic analogy may lead to feminine and masculine gender assignment. An extensive variation is observed in the whole group of indeclinables and for particular words, which is much larger than anything that can be found in indeclinable nouns. These data support the idea that both masculine and neuter genders have a special status in the Russian gender system (Magomedova & Slioussar 2023). Masculine tends to be chosen in case of conflicting gender cues. When there are no strong cues pointing to any gender, neuter is assigned as the default option. The results of the study are hardly compatible with various structural approaches to gender assignment, but can be accounted for in competition-based models. Keywords: grammatical gender, Russian, gender variation, corpus study, linguistics Published in RUNG: 26.01.2024; Views: 1226; Downloads: 3 Link to file This document has many files! More... |
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5. Advances in formal Slavic linguistics 20172020, proceedings of peer-reviewed scientific conference contributions (international and foreign conferences) Abstract: Advances in Formal Slavic Linguistics 2017 is a collection of fifteen articles that were prepared on the basis of talks given at the conference Formal Description of Slavic Languages 12.5, which was held on December 7-9, 2017, at the University of Nova Gorica. The volume covers a wide array of topics, such as control verbs, instrumental arguments, and perduratives in Russian, comparatives, negation, n-words, negative polarity items, and complementizer ellipsis in Czech, impersonal se-constructions and complementizer doubling in Slovenian, prosody and the morphology of multi-purpose suffixes in Serbo-Croatian, and indefinite numerals and the binding properties of dative arguments in Polish. Importantly, by exploring these phenomena in individual Slavic languages, the collection of articles in this volume makes a significant contribution to both Slavic linguistics and to linguistics in general. Keywords: Slavic, linguistics, Formal Description of Slavic Languages, control verbs, instrumental arguments, perduratives, comparatives, negation, n-words, negative polarity items, complementizer ellipsis, impersonal se-constructions, complementizer doubling, indefinite numerals, binding, Russian, Czech, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish Published in RUNG: 02.06.2020; Views: 3568; Downloads: 193 Full text (2,12 MB) |
6. Countability, agreement and the loss of the dual in RussianArthur Stepanov, Penka Stateva, 2018, original scientific article Keywords: agreement, atomicity, classifier, countability, dual number, numeral, Russian, Bulgarian Published in RUNG: 21.03.2018; Views: 4631; Downloads: 0 This document has many files! More... |
7. Countability and the structure of numeral-based QPsArthur Stepanov, Penka Stateva, unpublished invited conference lecture Keywords: countability, atomicity, numeral, agreement, dual number, classifier, russian, morphology, syntax, semantics Published in RUNG: 07.02.2018; Views: 4635; Downloads: 0 This document has many files! More... |