Article

Name: Predicate agreement with the words “r’ad,” “polovina,” “chast’,” “mnozhestvo” in contemporary Russian

Authors: Yulia M. Kuvshinskaya

National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation

In the section Linguistics

Abstract: he work deals with the strategies for predicate agreement to quantified noun groups headed by nouns r’ad, polovina, chast’, mnozhestvo. In Russian, as in other Slavic languages, predicate agreement with quantified noun phrases allows singular or plural forms of the predicate. Three agreement strategies are probable with quantifiers r’ad, polovina, chast’, mnozhestvo: full gram- matical agreement, semantic or default agreement. The study based on the National Russian Cor- pus enabled identifying the frequency and the ratio of the different agreement strategies and showed that the strategies of predicate agreement with quantifiers-nouns are not identical. The predicate is more likely to agree in plural with NP, headed by the word r’ad, than the words polovina, chast’, mnozhestvo. The paper analyses the reasons for the differences in the strategies of predicate agreement. For this purpose, the semantic and grammatical properties of quantifiers and the factors of context that influence the choice of the predicate are considered. The factors of animacy, word order, conjunct subjects and predicates, the type of predicate, adjectives agreed with quantifier are con- sidered in the paper. Some views on the influence of the factors of the context generally accepted in Russian linguistics are clarified. The study has shown that all the factors are extremely im- portant for the predicate agreement with r’ad and a few factors can influence the choice of the form of the predicate agreed with the words pololvina or chast’ – predominantly conjunct noun phrases and animacy.

Keywords: predicate agreement, quantified noun phrases, quantifiers, collective nouns, grammar, Russian language

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