Vestnik Pravoslavnogo Svâto-Tihonovskogo Gumanitarnogo Universiteta: Seriâ III. Filologiâ (Dec 2019)
Number of the predicate in phrases te/vse, kto prishel/prishli (‘those/all who came’, sg./pl.) and the case of the head: a corpus-based study
Abstract
This article deals with patterns in the choice of the grammatical number of the predicate in synonymous constructions of the type te, kto prishel vs. te, kto prishli ‘those who came’ (singular vs.plural of the verb) in Russian. It contains a statistical, grammatical and semantic analysis of sentences with these structures based on examples from the Russian National Corpus. We investigate both constructions with predicates expressed by verbs and constructions with predicates expressed by adjectives, participles, predicatives, as well as by adjectival pronouns. The article presents results of our analysis of the occurrence of these constructions in texts by various authors of the 19th — 21st centuries and reveals a previously unknown regularity, namely the dependence of the number of the predicate on the case of the head pronoun. It also checks the hypotheses about the dependence of the number of the predicate on its semantics, tense and part of speech, none of which having been confi rmed. The authors of the article are concerned with the character of sentences with predicate in the plural in terms of the language standard, since such sentences are often regarded as substandard by the school language standard, which is discordant with the opinion of authoritative linguistic reference literature. The school standard and scientifi c codifi cation disagree here, this being the reason why the study of the actual usage is particlularly interesting. Corpus analysis demonstrates that both the system and the usage are in line with the less rigid variant of standard-language restrictions, which leads to specifi c hypercorrectness in editorial practice. This is a term introduced by the authors to refer to correcting the already correct variant for the variant which is also correct and preferable from a subjective point of view of the editor, but does not refl ect the author’s intention.
Keywords
