Agreement with coordinated subjects containing a personal pronoun: Experimental data from Russian

Abstract

The article examines Russian predicative agreement with a coordinated subject containing personal pronouns. In cases when the conjuncts have different person features, the choice of person agreement is based on the person hierarchy; it is considered to be an almost universal mechanism. However, the corpus and experimental data presented in this article show that the person hierarchy is not strictly imposed in Russian. We consider the two types of coordinated subjects, mismatched in person: 1) я и Х ‘I and X’ / Х и я ‘X and I’, where X is a masculine proper name, and 2) я и ты ‘I and you’ / ты и я ‘you and me’. Six experiments were conducted using 1–7 Likert scale. The experiments presented sentences with different word order (SV(О) / (О)VS) and conjuncts (I and X / X and I / I and you / you and I). In addition, we included the predicate characteristics as separate factors in the experiments – temporal characteristics, unaccusativity/unergativity. In all experiments, 1st person plural agreement (for non-past tense) and plural agreement (for past tense) were rated most acceptable. Sentences with such agreement are also the most frequent in the collected corpus material. With (O)VS word order, first conjunct agreement also becomes possible. In non-past tense, 3rd person plural agreement is also acknowledged, even in experiments, in which none of the conjuncts bears the 3rd person feature. Examples with such agreement have also been found in the corpus. The acceptability level of possible agreement strategies depends on such factors as word order, conjuncts order, and agreement characteristics of the predicate