AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF THE EFFECT OF SYNTACTIC COMPLEXITY ON THE REALIZATION OF SENTENTIAL COMPLEMENTS IN RUSSIAN

Abstract

Declarative sentential complements in Russian can be realized either directly as čto-clauses or as čto-clauses embedded in the nominal construction headed by the “correlative” pronoun to. In previous studies, several factors that influence the choice of one of these two strategies have been identified, including the discourse status of the complement, the agentivity of the verb, the choice of the verb, register, etc. This study investigates the effect of syntactic complexity of the sententce in which the complement clause is embedded. The effect of complexity has been demonstrated before on the basis of several corpus studies of various constructions in English, which suggested that higher complexity is associated with the preference for the more explicit construction in the case of alternations. The goal of this study was to test whether complexity leads to a higher preference for the construction with the correlative (being the more explicit of the two alternants). Complexity was operationalized as additional embedding of the complement-taking predicate in a relative clause, either with a finite or a participial head (the latter presumably leading to still higher complexity). The hypothesis regarding the effect of complexity was tested in two experiments, an acceptability judgment study and a (100-scale) graded forced choice study. The experiments also tested the effect of the association between a verb and one of the two complementation strategies in the corpus (using the Attraction measure) as well as the effect of the subcategorization frame of the verb, i. e. whether it can take a direct object (by hypothesis, leading to the higher preference for čto-clauses) or only an oblique. The results of the experiments did not show an effect of complexity, which might be due to a small size of the effect and/or the nature of the task. However, the experiments revealed the effect of the Attraction class and of the subcategorization frame, namely, in oblique positions sentential complements show a higher preference for the correlative as opposed to direct positions. At the same time, verbs that have a higher association with čto-clauses in the corpus, show an approximately equal preference for both strategies. An explantion of this effect is proposed. Refs 16.