A long birth
The development of gender-specific paucal constructions in Russian
This article investigates the diachronic development of Russian numeral constructions consisting of a paucal
numeral (dva “two”, tri “three”, četyre “four”) followed by an adjective and a
noun. Based on statistical analysis of more than 6,000 corpus examples, it is shown that a split took place in the second half of
the twentieth century when feminine nouns developed a different agreement pattern from that of masculine and neuter nouns. This
split is argued to represent the final step in a long “birth process” of gender-specific paucal constructions that started with
the loss of the dual in the Middle Ages. It is suggested that we are witnessing a cascading effect, whereby the feminine pattern
develops when the pattern for masculine and neuter nouns is approaching stabilization. The article furthermore includes a
discussion of the hypothesis that “S-curves” represent a template for language change. While the documented changes resemble
S-curves, the proposed analysis also addresses some general problems with testing the S-curve hypothesis empirically.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Historical background
- 3.Corpus investigation 1: Random Forest and logistic regression
- 4.Corpus investigation 2: CART and logistic regression
- 5.S-curves in language change – A cascading effect?
- 6.Concluding remarks
- Notes
-
References
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