TY - CHAP

T1 - Paradigm leveling

T2 - The decay of consonant alternations in Russian

AU - Magomedova, Varvara

AU - Slioussar, Natalia

PY - 2017/1/1

Y1 - 2017/1/1

N2 - In this paper, we look at a paradigm leveling process currently taking place in Russian that affects historical consonant alternations (morphophonemic alternations that arose as a result of historical sound changes in Slavic and Russian specifically). In Standard Russian, these alternations are present in some verb forms (ljubit' 'to love'-ljublju 'I love'), in comparatives (suxoj 'dry'-suše 'drier, more dryly'), in deverbal nouns, and in some other grammatical categories. However, many non-standard forms in Russian lack alternations or have 'incorrect' alternations unattested in the standard language. Unfortunately, Russian corpora contain almost no such non-standard forms, and the best source of such data is the Internet. However, estimating relative frequencies of different forms found on the Internet is a challenge because the counts provided by search engines are extremely unreliable. We developed various strategies and a program to circumvent this problem and applied the technique to our study of alternations primarily in comparatives and to some extent also in verb forms.

AB - In this paper, we look at a paradigm leveling process currently taking place in Russian that affects historical consonant alternations (morphophonemic alternations that arose as a result of historical sound changes in Slavic and Russian specifically). In Standard Russian, these alternations are present in some verb forms (ljubit' 'to love'-ljublju 'I love'), in comparatives (suxoj 'dry'-suše 'drier, more dryly'), in deverbal nouns, and in some other grammatical categories. However, many non-standard forms in Russian lack alternations or have 'incorrect' alternations unattested in the standard language. Unfortunately, Russian corpora contain almost no such non-standard forms, and the best source of such data is the Internet. However, estimating relative frequencies of different forms found on the Internet is a challenge because the counts provided by search engines are extremely unreliable. We developed various strategies and a program to circumvent this problem and applied the technique to our study of alternations primarily in comparatives and to some extent also in verb forms.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85038879741&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1163/9789004342934_007

DO - 10.1163/9789004342934_007

M3 - Chapter

AN - SCOPUS:85038879741

T3 - Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory

SP - 123

EP - 137

BT - Perspectives on Morphological Organization

PB - Brill

ER -