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The role of case and presuppositionality in the distribution of to čto-clauses in colloquial Russian: an experimental study
In Russian, argument clauses can be nominalized by the demonstrative pronoun to ‘that’ (henceforth, to čto-clauses). Although to čto-clauses have often been discussed in the literature, their distribution is still not fully understood and is subject to conflicting claims, partly owing to the fact that to čto in the accusative/nominative position coincides the “emerging” (noninflected) complementizer to čto in nonstandard colloquial varieties of Russian. This paper focuses on the acceptability status of to čto-clauses in the accusative position, which have been deemed generally degraded (or unacceptable) in standard Russian by some accounts (referred to here as case-based accounts), in contrast to the oblique/object-of-P position (where both čto- and to čto-clauses are optional). On other accounts that view to čto as the marker of given/familiar information, there is no general constraint against to čto-clauses in the accusative as long as the predicate is compatible with familiar complements. In this paper, we test these two accounts experimentally, focusing on the prediction of the givenness-based account according to which different predicate classes, specifically presuppositional vs. nonpresuppositional, differ in the frequency of to čto-clauses (irrespective of their case properties). Using elicited production and acceptability judgments, we confirm the view that to čto-clauses in the accusative position with presuppositional predicates, e.g. otricat’ ‘deny’, osoznat’ ‘realize’, etc. are indeed acceptable, in contrast to nonpresuppositional predicates. In addition, we show that presuppositional predicates show a higher rate of to čto- clauses in the oblique/object-of-P position, further supporting the givenness-based account. Yet, we also find that accusative-marked to čto-clauses with predicates like osoznat’ ‘realize’ are produced much less frequently than expected based on their presuppositionality. We explain this by an independent dispreference for accusative-marked to čto-clauses in production, supporting a weaker version of the case-based view. We offer a tentative proposal as to how case and presuppositionality can be combined in a unified account of the distribution of to čto-clauses. Last but not least, our results also shed light on the status of nonstandard to čto, which, as we show, displays a specific acceptability profile characteristic of stigmatized grammatical variants.