Asymmetry in Russian metalinguistic comparatives: corpus and experimental evidence

Voprosy Jazykoznanija. 2024. No. 2. P. 35–51.

Zevakhina N., Shchipkova A. A.

The paper provides corpus and experimental evidence for three types of Russian asymmetric metalinguistic comparatives (lučše, skoree, and bol’še meta-comparatives), two parts of which belong to different syntactic categories or have different morphological forms. The paper points out that meta-comparatives have certain morphological and syntactic properties and show diversity among their various grammatical patterns. From a morphological point of view, imperfective infinitives and perfective finite verbs in the subjunctive and indicative mood play a special role in asymmetric meta-comparatives. From a syntactic point of view, asymmetric meta-comparatives are either bi-clausal, bi-phrasal, or mixed (clausal-phrasal). Their bi-phrasal variety shows functional homogeneity. Lučše meta-comparatives are more frequent in the corpus and are evaluated as more grammatical than skoree meta-comparatives. Furthermore, the asymmetric pattern ‘noun phrase + infinitive phrase’ is evaluated as more grammatical than the pattern ‘verb phrase (finite form) + infinitive phrase’ for lučše meta-comparatives, while there is no such contrast between these patterns for skoree meta-comparatives. All these facts shed light on the grammatical portrait of Russian meta-comparatives as well as on the use and evaluation of asymmetric meta-comparatives in a natural language in general. The present study contributes to the discussion of grammatical asymmetry in parallel syntactic structures (comparative and coordinated structures, among others).

Keywords: корпусное исследование, corpus study, metalinguistic comparatives, металингвистические сравнительные конструкции, standard comparatives, syntactic asymmetry, grammaticality judgment task, стандартные сравнительные конструкции, синтаксическая асимметрия