Stem initial alternation in Russian third person pronouns: variation in grammar

P. 95–103.

Daniel M.

The paper discusses the present stage of the evolution of the initial [n]/[j] stem alternation in Russian third person pronouns. After providing a short overview of the origins of the forms, I focus on their category status, discuss Zalizniak’s ‘adpositionality’ in some detail, and then proceed to considering the cases where the ‘n’-forms are induced by a distant ‘controller’. I will show that the fact that the ‘n’-forms are essentially variants is better accounted for by the notion of ‘trigger’ of a morphological variant. To my eyes, this open ways to a better understanding of the observed evidence than that using the conventional notion of morphosyntactic controller, on the one hand—and certainly than explaining them in (morpho)phonological terms. In the end, I will briefly argue that, in a sense, the evolution of the alternation is similar to degrammaticalization, showing a movement from a morphophonologically conditioned external sandhi to a morphosyntactic category similar to government.

Keywords: русский язык, Национальный корпус русского языка, падеж, Russian, morphology, Russian National Corpus, предлоги, pronouns, prepositions, external sandhi, demonstratives, morphological case, внешние сандхи, указательные местоимения

Publication based on the results of: Corpus studies of language variation: from deviations to linguistic norm (2015)

In book

Компьютерная лингвистика и интеллектуальные технологии. По материалам ежегодной Международной конференции "Диалог" (2015)

М.: Изд-во РГГУ, 2015.