Linear Position of Russian Focus Particles: an Experimental Study

Student: Zmanovskiy Nikita

Educational Programme: Fundamental and Computational Linguistics (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2020

Focus particles like Russian даже ‘even’ or только ‘only’ can appear in any given position in the sentence although they usually modify the specific phrasal categories. Thus, we can state that focus particles can move across the sentence. It is also possible for the dependent phrase to move with the particle even though this may violate several syntactic constraints. Interestingly, native speakers of Russian language tend to judge the sentences resulted form these types of movements as grammatical and semantically interpretable. We studied this phenomenon closer via a series of psycholinguistic experiments with grammaticality judgement tasks. In our work, we found a significant difference between the grammaticality scores of different types of syntactic constructions with the particle только 'only'.

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