Диссертации, представленные на защиту и подготовленные в НИУ ВШЭ

The dissertation presents a series of studies of gender agreement in modern Russian with a special focus on the role of the surface noun form – the surface similarity and frequency of form patterns. The main idea that I propose in the dissertation is that surface form patterns may influence structural features: both their choice and their processing. I also propose that the diversity of surface forms in Russian masculine nouns is the reason for the special status of the masculine gender in terms of markedness and productivity.The dissertation is based on three studies of gender variation. In the first study, we analyze different structural and phonological factors affecting variation in gender agreement and propose a new approach to the problem of gender markedness in Russian. Namely, neuter is the unmarked gender language-wide, while masculine is the greedy class due to its frequency and diversity. In the second study, we analyze how gender and case are interconnected: why it is only in the nominative that some nouns are acceptable with a feminine agreement. We also look at how their acceptability in other cases is affected by syncretism.It appears that they are especially problematic in locative and the reason for that are the syncretism patterns of inflectional affixes.The third study explores the influence of head syncretism and the dependent noun syncretism on attraction effects in gender agreement processing. Syncretism is crucial for detecting agreement errors in processing, as we have shown in experiments on gender agreement attraction.

The papers collected in Natalia Slioussar’s dissertation are dedicated to the experimental study of inflectional morphology in Russian. Six papers study the relevance of several core concepts from theoretical morphology for language production and processing. These concepts include morphological regularity, productivity, feature markedness, different types of syncretism. As a result of this enterprise, we also learn something new about these concepts, so the main idea of the dissertation is to show how theory and experiment can interact fruitfully. The seventh paper presents a lexical database that contains more than 50 thousand Russian words with more than 1.7 million word forms characterized for more than 70 different parameters. It can be used to facilitate stimulus selection for experimental research. The papers study production and processing of isolated word forms and word forms in a sentence (primarily on the example of number and gender agreement) and in a wider discourse context, using behavioral and neuroimaging methods.