PERSON-NUMBER AGREEMENT WITH SUBJECTS CONTAINING COORDINATING AND CORRELATIVE CONJUNCTIONS IN RUSSIAN

Abstract

The article describes a corpus and experimental study of the variability of person-number agreement in Russian in the context of coordinated subjects, whose elements differ in person. Experimental and corpus studies have demonstrated that in such constructions with the conjunction и ‘and’, in addition to resolved agreement, 3 rd person plural agreement and (for VS word order) closest conjunct agreement are possible. This work aims to illustrate the variability of person-number agreement with coordinated subjects that involve other conjunctions, namely и … и ‘both … and’, или ‘or’ and или … или ‘either … or’. The article describes the results of a corpus study and four linguistic experiments. The acceptability judgement experiments aim to complement corpus data on the investigated constructions, which, in some cases, were found to be limited. The results revealed greater variability in agreement with constructions containing disjunctive conjunctions compared to analogous constructions with conjunctive conjunctions. The most frequent and acceptable agreement option in all cases is resolved agreement. The possibility of 3 rd person plural agreement was also discovered, as documented in previous experimental studies and corpus data. Other possible agreement strategies for constructions with disjunctive conjunctions include closest disjunct agreement and (for disjunct order X или я ‘X or I’ / или Х, или я ‘either X or I’) 3 rd person singular agreement.