Agency and Transitivity of the Verb as Factors Influencing the Realization of the Sentential Complement as a Clause with the Complementizer “что” or as a Construction with “то, что” in Russian: an Experimental Study with Nonce Verbs

Previous studies on the material of the Russian language showed that some characteristics of the verb can affect the choice of a sentential actant with the conjunction что or the construction то, что. These characteristics are, in particular, agency and transitivity of the verb. The aim of this work is to test the hypothesis that with non-transitive verbs the sentential actant with что will generally be less common than with transitive verbs, as well as checking the influence of the agency factor on the joining of this type of subordinate clause with the verbs of the semantic field 'showing': it is expected that with agentive non-transitive verbs the percentage of clauses with что will be higher than with non-agentive. A production experiment was conducted, for which four non-existent verbs were invented. The percentage ratio of generated sentential actants with the conjunction что was calculated for each of the four sets of combinations of factors of transitivity and agency. These data confirm the assumption that with non-transitive verbs clause with что is less common than with transitive verbs, but at the same time, the assumption that the agency factor has a significant effect on joining clauses with что is not confirmed. It was not possible to identify the effects of the interaction of agency and transitivity factors on the joining of a certain type of subordinate clause, which is confirmed by statistical analyzes. During the discussion of the obtained results, it was suggested that with the non-transitive verbs existing in the Russian language, there is a lexical factor: only specific non-agentive verbs of the semantic field ‘showing’ are influenced by the agency factor when joining clause with что.