Natalia Zevakhina

This paper reports on two flash-mode experiments that test redundant descriptions of small (2–4) cardinalities, borderline (5–8) cardinalities, and color in referential communication. It provides further support for the idea that small cardinalities are more salient (due to subitizing), less sensitive to visual context, and therefore give rise to h...

This paper reports on two flash-mode experiments that test redundant descriptions of small (2-4) cardinalities, borderline (5-8) cardinalities, and color in referential communication. It provides further support for the idea that small cardinalities are more salient (due to subitizing), less sensitive to visual context, and therefore give rise to h...

The paper reports a corpus and experimental study of three types of Russian asymmetric metalinguistic comparatives (lučše, skoree, and bol’še meta-comparatives), two parts of which belong to different syntactic categories and/or have different morphological forms. We discuss their morphological and syntactic properties and uncover diversity among t...

The paper provides psycholinguistic evidence that the distinction between soft and hard presupposition triggers is sensitive to clauses embedded under attitude, reporting, and emotive verbs. The paper argues that these contexts represent yet another type of context along with Family of Sentences (antecedent of conditional, modal assertion, and yes/...

This paper experimentally investigates the role of veridicality and the cause-effect relation in the derivation of (a) conditional perfection and (b) logical entailment in Russian esli-conditionals and raz-conditionals. It provides further evidence that conditional perfection is a structurally defined phenomenon. Moreover, it presents a crosslingui...

Free download until Apr 18 here: https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1ec6G1L-nhPma4 In the literature on nominal tautologies, it is assumed that common knowledge is a crucial ingredient for their interpretation. This paper explores a different approach: we argue that invoking shared knowledge is at the same time too strict and too vague as a conditio...

The paper reports on an experiment that shows the preference of pair-list interpretations over single-pair interpretations in Russian multiple coordinated and non-coordinated wh-interrogatives and wh-exclamatives. Moreover, the paper points out that neither the Superiority effect nor the distinction between argument and adjunct wh-phrases determine...

The paper reports on two experiments that investigate whether polarity, clause order and incentive influence derivation of Conditional Perfection in two types of inducements (promises and threats). Both experiments are designed as inference tasks, additionally measuring reaction times to inferences. The paper shows that the derivation of Conditiona...

The paper presents experimental evidence for the over-specification of small cardinalities in referential communication. The first experiment shows that when presented with a small set (2, 3, or 4) of unique objects, the speaker includes a numeral denoting a small cardinality into the description of given objects, although it is over-informative fo...

This paper presents experimental evidence for overspecification of small cardinalities in refer-ence production. The idea is that when presented with a small set of unique objects (2, 3 or 4), the speaker includes a small cardinality while describing given objects, although it is overin-formative for the hearer (e.g., 'three stars'). On the contrar...

The current paper experimentally studies the projection diversity of the following presupposition triggers in the Standard Chuvash language in assertive sentences, in negated assertive sentences and in conditional sentences: kallex ‘again’ (adverbial), ta ‘too’ (conjunction), mansa kaj ‘forget’ and pəl ‘know/find out’ (mental factive verbs), and pə...

It has been acknowledged that the null subject of a converbial clause in Russian is canonically controlled by the Nominative subject of a main clause (that is, Nominative subject control). Non-Nominative control has been considered to be ungrammatical. On the basis of two experiments (an acceptability judgement task and speeded grammaticality judge...

Relying upon Fillenbaum (1975), the paper reports on a more systematic experimental study of the role of the following factors (and levels) in the derivation of Conditional Perfection: negation (no negation, negation in an antecedent, negation in a consequent, negation both in an antecedent and a consequent), order of two clauses of a conditional s...

Based on the data from the Russian National Corpus, the paper studies Russian wh-exclamatives with and without predicates. Firstly, it lists wh-exclamatives with each of the following eight wh-words: do čego, kak, kakoj, kakov, naskol’ko, skol’, skol’ko, čto za. Secondly, on the basis of the corpus frequencies of the established wh-exclamatives, it...

The paper studies Russian metalinguistic comparatives. Specifically, it argues that Russian exhibits three single meta-comparatives (skoree ‘sooner’, bol′še ‘more’, and lučše ‘better’, lit.), which are derived as a result of grammaticalisation of corresponding standard comparatives and three double meta-comparatives (skoree bol′še, bol′še skoree, a...

This paper provides evidence for Evans' (2007) insubordination hypothesis w.r.t. wh-exclamatives. It investigates word order in matrix wh-exclamatives and their subordinate correlates and tests matrix-subordinate asymmetry (the felicitousness of wh-words in matrix and subordinate contexts). It establishes distinctions among three groups of wh-excla...

This paper reports upon the study of the lexico-grammatical distribution of Russian matrix predicates selecting kakoj remarkable clauses (or so-called 'embedded' exclama-tives) in the Russian National Corpus, with some cross-linguistic parallels. It reveals that Russian matrix predicates belong to four conceptual classes: perceptual, mental, emotiv...

The Corpus of Russian Student Texts (CoRST) is a computational and research project started in 2013 at the Linguistic Laboratory for Corpora Research Technologies at HSE. It comprises a collection of Russian texts written by students from various Russian universities. Its main research goal is to examine language deviations viewed as markers of lan...

This paper focuses on the meaning of degree modifiers such as slightly and completely, when they are either more prosodically prominent than the scalar adjective they modify or less so. Thus, one challenge is to explain the meaning, function and distribution of these modifiers. A second challenge is to explain the way accentuation (prosodic promine...

Relying upon the data of Russian and other languages, this paper discusses various types of negation in exclamatives. It argues that morphological negation is felicitous in exclamatives. However, sentential negation exhibits diversity. Its wide scope variety seems to be absolutely ungrammatical in all the languages under consideration. On the contr...

We present experimental evidence showing that there is considerable variation between the rates at which scalar expressions from different lexical scales give rise to upper-bounded construals. We investigated two factors that might explain the variation between scalar expressions: first, the availability of the lexical scales, which we measured on...

The study presented in this paper has two aims. First, it establishes pragmasemantic features of exclamations and exclamatives relying on three formulated approaches – a constructional approach, a presupposition approach, and a scalarity approach, and suggests distinguishing proper exclamatives, the syntactic structures of which are conventionally...

This paper argues that modeling granularity and approximation (Krifka 2007; Lewis 1979) is crucial for capturing important aspects of the distribution and interpretation of adjectives and their modifiers, modulo certain differences between modified adjectives and numerals. In addition, the paper presents supporting experimental results with minimiz...