Open AccessSubject-object subextraction asymmetry in Russian
Author(s) -
Daria Belovа
Publication year - 2020
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Conference proceedings
DOI - 10.36505/exling-2020/11/0012/000427
Subject(s) - subject (documents) , transitive relation , object (grammar) , linguistics , verb , computer science , position (finance) , agreement , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , mathematics , combinatorics , philosophy , finance , library science , economics
Subject-object asymmetry in wh-subextraction is relevant in many languages, but the degree of subject opacity is not crosslinguistically uniform and can differ within one language. In (Polinsky et al. 2013) two factors are found statistically significant in Russian dependent clauses: the type of verbal structure (unaccusative / unergative / transitive verb) and the position of a subject relatively to a verb (preverbal / postverbal). In this paper we investigate whether the effect of these variables is preserved in Russian monopredicative independent clauses. Using experimental data, we show that different types of subjects do differ in their island properties, however, contra (Polinsky et al. 2013), in the preverbal position they are significantly more transparent to subextraction.