Диссертация (1136198), страница 17
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Moreover, even if we take nouns with conceptual gender,as mal’čik “boyM ” or sestra “sisterF ” in Russian, it makes littlesense to assume that, for example, having an M dependent NPcould make an F noun “more masculine.” Notably, we do notwant to say that the existence of attraction with semanticallyempty features implies that conceptual numerosity cannot playany role for number agreement attraction - various experimentalfindings clearly indicate that it does (e.g., Bock and Cutting, 1992;Eberhard, 1999; Haskell and MacDonald, 2005; Mirkovic andMacDonald, 2013).
We would only like to stress that attractionis possible without any semantic effects of this sort and thereforeshould result from some process that does not depend on them1.3.2. Previous Studies on Languages with ThreeGendersBadecker and Kuminiak (2007) (henceforth, B&K) report resultsof three production experiments on Slovak. Slovak has threegenders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. M is the most frequent,N is the least frequent, but is used in impersonal constructions.In all experiments, participants were given subject NPs (oftencalled “preambles’) and asked to generate complete sentences.In Experiment 1, B&K compared the number of errors in two4 In combinations like MFM the first letter shows the gender of the head, the secondletter - the gender of the attractor, the third letter (if present) the gender of thepredicate.Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org442November 2016 | Volume 7 | Article 1651Slioussar and MalkoGender Agreement Attraction in Russian(e.g., from the formal properties of features).
Semantic effects canbe added to the picture, but this is optional.krasivyj “beautifulM.NOM.SG ” - krasivaja “beautifulF.NOM.SG ” krasivoe “beautifulN.NOM.SG ”). Thus, we cannot say that M formsare morphologically unmarked, even if we limit ourselves topredicates. In impersonal sentences, where unmarked forms areexpected, N predicates are used, as (4) shows.1.4. The Present StudyApparently, gender agreement attraction errors are more difficultto induce than number errors. For example, Vigliocco et al.(1995) did not observe them in Italian, although they werefound in subsequent experiments. So we decided to run anotherproduction experiment on Russian replicating B&K’s firstexperiment on Slovak (which, in terms of its gender system, isvery close to Russian).
Our goal was to see whether any attractionerrors would be induced, and, if yes, whether the pattern would besimilar to B&K’s study or to what has been observed for French,Spanish, or Italian. We also planned comprehension experimentsbecause no existing studies had looked at comprehension in alanguage with three genders.
We were particularly interested tofind out whether production and comprehension results wouldbe parallel and whether ungrammaticality illusions would befound. Before we move on to the experiments, let us present abrief overview of the Russian gender system.(4) Svetalo.dawnPST.N.SGIt dawned.As for gender conflict resolution, another classical test formarkedness, it is of limited use in Russian because there isno gender agreement in plural.
Gender conflict resolution canbe observed only in constructions like “X and Y each didsomething.” We conducted an informal questionnaire, askingabout 30 native speakers.As we discuss below, acceptability of such sentences differsdepending on animacy of the nouns and the genders that arecombined, and there is substantial individual variation amongspeakers. However, one crucial generalization can be made:examples with the feminine or neuter forms of každyj “each’are never found even marginally acceptable, only some exampleswith the masculine forms are.Firstly, let us consider sentences with M and F nouns, like in(5). Not all speakers of Russian find these examples acceptable,but for those who do, this construction sounds better withhuman animates (5a) than with non-human animates (5b).Nobody accepts this construction with inanimate nouns, as in6a), although they can be used in such sentences if both nounsare of the same gender, as in (6b)5 .1.4.1.
Russian Gender SystemRussian nouns are inflected for number and case, and the onesthat have the same endings in the majority of forms are groupedinto declension classes. Russian has three declension classes fornouns (and a separate class for substantivized adjectives). Thefirst class includes almost all M nouns (they have zero endingsin nominative singular, like mal’čik “boy”) and all N nouns(they have -o or -e endings, like okno “window”).
These M andN nouns use the same set of endings in all cases except forgenitive plural and nominative and accusative in singular andplural (in plural, all declension classes have the same endingsin dative, instrumental and locative). The second class includesthe majority of F nouns (they end in -a or -ja, like devočka“girl”) and a small group of animate M nouns with the sameendings, like mužčina “man.” The third class includes F nounswith zero endings in nominative singular, like doč’ “daughter.”In addition to that, there are some irregular and uninflectednouns.Thus, in most cases, it is impossible to determine the gender ofthe noun unambiguously looking at the noun itself, and, at leastprima facie, we cannot speak of something like morphologicalmarkedness in the noun system. Let us add that M nouns arethe most frequent and N nouns are the least frequent.
M nounsconstitute about a half of the lexicon, F nouns - about 30–35%, Nnouns are the rest (Yanovich and Fedorova, 2006; Slioussar andSamoilova, 2014).Gender agreement can be observed only in singular, onadjectives, participles and past tense verb forms. Russianadjectives and participles have so-called full forms (usedattributively and predicatively) and short forms (used only inpredicates and inflected for number and gender, but not for case).M form is the citation form (i.e., the form would appear indictionaries, grammatical descriptions etc.).Verb forms and short forms of adjectives and participles havezero endings in M gender (e.g., byl “wasM ” - byla “wasF ” bylo “wasN ”), otherwise all forms have non-zero endings (e.g.,Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org(5)a.
Mužčinai ženščinakaždyjmanM.NOM.SG and womanF.NOM.SG eachM.NOM.SGsjelipojablokuatePST.PL PREPDISTR appleDAT.SGi svin’jab. JožhedgehogM.NOM.SG and swineF.NOM.SGkaždyjsjelipojabloku.eachM.NOM.SG atePST.PL PREPDISTR appleDAT.SG(6)a. Divani krovat’každyjsofaM.NOM.SG and bedF.NOM.SG eachM.NOM.SGstoiliceloesostojanie.costPST.PL wholeACC.SG fortuneACC.SGb. Kušetkai krovat’každajacouchF.NOM.SG and bedF.NOM.SG eachF.NOM.SGstoiliceloesostojanie.costPST.PL wholeACC.SG fortuneACC.SGNow let us look at M and N nouns.
More than half ofthe speakers we asked rejected this construction even withanimate human nouns (7a) as ungrammatical, but thosewho accepted it used masculine form. All our informantsrejected examples with non-human animates like (7b) or5 Sinceacceptability ratings for some sentences vary from speaker to speaker, wedo not mark any of the examples below with asterisks or question marks used toindicate ungrammaticality or marginal acceptability.543November 2016 | Volume 7 | Article 1651Slioussar and MalkoGender Agreement Attraction in Russianfound them only marginally acceptable. This might be at leastpartly due to independent factors (the relevant neuter words,like mlekopitajuščee “mammal,” životnoe “animal,” nasekomoe“insect,” tend to be abstract), but is still telling.(7)accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and the existingRussian and international regulations concerning ethics inresearch.
All participants provided informed consent. They weretested at the Laboratory for Cognitive Studies of Saint-PetersburgState University.a. Voini dit’akaždyjwarriorM.NOM.SG and childN.NOM.SG eachM.NOM.SGsjelipojabloku.atePST.PL PREPDISTR appleDAT.SG2.2. MaterialsIn this experiment, participants first saw a predicate, then on thenext slide a subject at which point they were asked to produce acomplete sentence. In half of the cases, predicates did not agreewith the subject in gender, and participants were asked to modifythem. Like in B&K’s study, subject noun phrases were alwaysbuilt according to the following schema: NP1 –preposition–NP2 ,e.g., okno vo dvor “windowN.SG to yardM.SG .” NP1 was alwaysin nominative singular, NP2 was in accusative singular.
Weselected inanimate nouns that have the same form in accusativeand nominative, since this was shown to inflate the error rate(Badecker and Kuminiak, 2007). As in many other agreementattraction studies, we had both adjunct and argument PPs.The predicates always consisted of two words: the copulabyt’ “to be” in the past tense (where gender agreement can beobserved) and an adjective or participle. We opted for suchpredicates because they are short and do not contain any objectsor other nouns that could cause additional disturbance of subjectpredicate agreement (initially, we wanted to use single verbs,but could not come up with such predicates for all experimentalstimuli). Adjectives and participles were always in instrumentalsingular form7 .The genders of NP1 and NP2 were manipulated. AsTable 1 shows, these two factors were not fully crossed. Likein B&K’s Experiment 1, we used only seven out of ninepossible combinations of genders.
Additionally, we manipulatedthe agreement marking on the predicate8 . Sample stimuli inconditions 1-4 in Table 1 represent one set: two variants ofthe subject NP (one head and two different dependent nouns,or attractors) and two variants of the predicate (matched ormismatched in gender with the subject). We constructed 48sets, 12 for each of the four combinations of conditions. Thisapproach to the construction of materials (one head nounand several attractors of different genders, plus a grammaticaland an ungrammatical version of the predicate) holds for allexperiments in this article. All materials are listed in Appendicesin Supplementary Material.In addition to that, we constructed 100 fillers, also consistingof a predicate and a subject. Subject NPs had singular or plurali nasekomoekaždyjb.
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