Paradigm leveling in non-standard Russian
Slioussar Natalia, Kholodilova Maria · 2013
Paradigm leveling has been extensively studied in different linguistic traditions (e.g. Albright 2002, 2010; Anttila 1977; Benua 1997; Bybee 1985; Kiparsky 1982, 2002; Kurylowicz 1949; Kenstowicz 1996; Manczak 1958; McCarthy 2005; Steriade 2000). We analyze several leveling processes currently taking place in Russian, focusing on nonstandard innovative verb forms. We show that leveling can simultaneously go in two opposite directions, but some innovations (involving underapplication rather than overapplication of alternations) are more frequent. We discuss examples of alternations that are unattested in standard Russian and examine different factors that influence leveling. Unfortunately, Russian corpora contain almost no non-standard forms that we were interested in, so we had to look for them on the Internet. Estimating relative frequencies of different forms found there is a challenge because the counts provided by search engines are extremely unreliable. To circumvent this problem, we used the following strategy. First we established what variants of a particular form are attested (an example is analyzed in section 2.2.1). Then we included all variants in one search, i.e. asked the search engine to look for them simultaneously. We sorted the results by date (if they are sorted by relevance, bigger sites, which tend to pay more attention to the literary norm, are given priority) and looked through all of them or through the first 1000, which is the maximum allowed by search engines. We excluded repeating or irrelevant hits by hand and counted different forms’ frequencies. If we found that a variant is attested, but it did not