Predicting complex syntactic structure in real time: Processing of negative sentences in Russian

ABSTRACT

In Russian negative sentences the verb’s direct object may appear either in the accusative case, which is licensed by the verb (as is common cross-linguistically), or in the genitive case, which is licensed by the negation (Russian-specific “genitive-of-negation” phenomenon). Such sentences were used to investigate whether case marking is employed for anticipating syntactic structure, and whether lexical heads other than the verb can be predicted on the basis of a case-marked noun phrase. Experiment 1, a completion task, confirmed that genitive-of-negation is part of Russian speakers’ active grammatical repertoire. In Experiments 2 and 3, the genitive/accusative case manipulation on the preverbal object led to shorter reading times at the negation and verb in the genitive versus accusative condition. Furthermore, Experiment 3 manipulated linear order of the direct object and the negated verb in order to distinguish whether the abovementioned facilitatory effect was predictive or integrative in nature, and concluded that the parser actively predicts a verb and (otherwise optional) negation on the basis of a preceding genitive-marked object. Similarly to a head-final language, case-marking information on preverbal noun phrases (NPs) is used by the parser to enable incremental structure building in a free-word-order language such as Russian.

KEYWORDS:

• Case marking
• Genitive-of-negation
• Parsing syntactic dependencies
• Predictive structure building
• Preverbal objects
• Russian
• Sentence processing

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the input of Lauren Ackerman, John Bailyn, Olga Belichenko, Harald Clahsen, Emily Darley, Claudia Felser, Ellen Lau, Leticia Pablos, Alesi Rowland, Segre Sharoff, Patrick Sturt, Matt Wagers, and especially Roger van Gompel and Masaya Yoshida to different aspects of the project. I also thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the manuscript. The experiments could not have been run without the assistance of the organizers and staff of the New York–St. Petersburg Institute of Cognitive and Cultural Studies to whom I am most grateful.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Russian has a free word order. By default, the order in affirmative ditransitive sentences is “subject^NOM–verb–direct object^ACC–indirect object^DAT”; in negative sentences there is an additional negation that immediately precedes the verb. The present study focuses on a scrambled word order with verb objects preceding the verb: “subject^NOM–direct object^ACC–indirect object^DAT–(neg) verb”. The reader is referred to Sekerina (1997, 2003) and Slioussar (2011) for a review on processing of scrambled word orders in Russian.

2. The counts are based on the first 200 documents yielded by the search for the negative particle “ne” directly followed by a verb. This corresponded to 704 individual sentences each containing a negated verb, which were further screened for whether the sentence also contained a direct object (343 sentences did). Only instances for which the case of the object NP could be determined unambiguously were included, which led to the exclusion of 22 sentences with singular or plural animate objects for which their genitive and accusative forms are identical—for example, volka “wolf.Masc.Sg.Gen/Acc” or koshek “cat.Fem.Pl.Gen/Acc”.

3. Of all these licensors, the most frequent ones are, in the order of decreasing frequency: nouns (54.4% of all cases), prepositions (26.4%), numerals (9.1%), and negation (4.3%), followed by adverbs (2.9%) and quirky verbs (2.1%). The counts are based on approximately 1220 sentences with a genitive NP extracted from the Russian National Corpus (www.ruscorpora.ru). Only the first genitive NP in each sentence was counted. These numbers make it clear that, generally, a genitive-marked NP by itself does not guarantee the presence of negation in the sentence.

4. A further consideration that was taken into account is that the genitive form of plural nouns coincides with their partitive form (if such form is available)—for example, Ivan ne kupil cvetov^GEN “Ivan didn’t buy flowers” versus Ivan kupil cvetov^PART “Ivan bought some flowers”. However, partitive nouns almost never appear preverbally (due to the necessity to follow an existential closure, which is normally introduced by the verb; Fischer, 2004). Hence, in the experimental sentences NP^GEN is unlikely to be mistaken for a partitive noun.