Paradigm leveling in non-standard Russian: consonant alternations in comparatives and nouns

This paper analyzes a paradigm leveling process currently taking place in Russian that affects consonant alternations. In standard Russian, these alternations are present in some verb forms (ljubit’ ‘to love’ – ljublju ‘I love’), in comparatives (suxoj ‘dry’ / suxo ‘dryly’ – suše ‘drier, more dryly’) and before certain derivational suffixes (noga ‘leg’ – nožka ‘small leg, furniture leg’). However, many non-standard forms lack these alternations or have ‘incorrect’ variants unattested in standard Russian. Slioussar and Kholodilova (2013) demonstrated that although leveling simultaneously goes in two opposite directions, underapplication of consonant alternations is more widespread than overapplication in verb forms. Here, we continue their work studying comparatives and nouns. Our search for non-standard comparatives and noun forms in different corpora produced almost no results. Therefore we searched the Internet and elicited forms in an experiment. Web search: methods and tools. Estimating relative frequencies of different forms found on the Internet is a challenge mainly because the counts provided by search engines are extremely imprecise (we used the Yandex search engine, which is very popular in Russia, but this is also true for Google etc.). To circumvent this problem, we used the method suggested by Slioussar and Kholodilova (2013). Namely, we first established what variants are attested searching for all theoretically possible forms and then put all attested forms in a single query, i.e. asked the search engine to look for them simultaneously. Then we sorted the results by date, counted relative frequencies of different variants (in the first one thousand results, if more were found) and did the relevant statistical tests. To facilitate preparing queries and processing of the massive amount of results, we developed a collection of Perl scripts called Lingui-Pingui. This program can automatically form queries from the list of given morphs, send them to the search engine, download the results, sort them according to specified criteria and do various counts. Web search: results for comparatives. In standard Russian, ten adjectives with the stems ending in -d, -t and more than one hundred adjectives with the stems ending in -g, -k, -x (all such adjectives) have synthetic comparatives with consonant alternations; both groups are not productive. Two types of adjectives were selected for our study: (1) 9 adjectives with stem-final dental plosives and 24 adjectives with stem-final velars that have normative synthetic comparatives with alternations; (2) 19 adjectives with stem-final velars that do not have normative synthetic comparatives, but native speakers still tend to generate such forms. Group 1. We found that if a standard form exists, the process of alternation loss is more sporadic than in the case of verbs: usually about 1-2% forms lack alternations, although some adjectives like ubogij ‘poky’ or uprugij ‘resilient’ have up to 30% of comparatives without alternations. Unlike with verbs, no significant correlation with lemma frequency or the last consonant of the stem was found. Group 2. This group consisted primarily of compound adjectives. Analogous simplex adjectives have synthetic comparatives with alternations, while these adjectives have only analytic standard forms. When speakers nevertheless try to form synthetic comparatives, these forms lack alternations significantly more often than in the first group. The most important factor is whether the second part of the compound is used as an independent adjective. If it is (e.g. zorkij ‘sharp-sighted’ for dal'nozorkij ‘long-sighted’), most comparatives have alternations. If it is not (e.g. dlinnorukij ‘longarmed’, dlinnonogij ‘long-legged’), the majority of comparatives lack alternations. This is noteworthy because the relevant stems with alternations can be found in many highly frequent words, e.g. ručka ‘small hand, handle’, nožka ‘small leg, furniture leg’. So it seems to be crucial whether a particular form is listed in the mental lexicon, not whether a model or even a particular version of the stem is available. This is similar to Slioussar and Kholodilova’s results with the verbs: in the I class, the model is productive, but it plays the most important role whether a standard form with alternations from a particular verb is stored in the lexicon. Experiment: results for comparatives. All tendencies observed for comparatives on the Internet were replicated in an experiment where participants (27 speakers of Russian, age 14-56)1 were asked to produce comparatives from various real and nonce adjectives. The forms were embedded in short standardized sentences they were asked to complete. Notably, there were no restrictions on using ana-