The phenomenon of Russian honorific agreement was first mentioned and used as evidence in Agreement Hierarchy by Greville Corbett (1979). Since then it has received little attention in the...Show moreThe phenomenon of Russian honorific agreement was first mentioned and used as evidence in Agreement Hierarchy by Greville Corbett (1979). Since then it has received little attention in the literature, unlike the other, more famous, cases of semantic agreement, e.g. hybrid nouns (Corbett 2015), pancake sentences (Enger 2004). This thesis is dedicated to investigating honorific agreement in Russian on the basis of independently collected data from the Russian National Corpus and a number of individually selected literary works.Show less
Contrastive focus reduplication (CR) is one of many types of reduplication. CR constructions can be interpreted in a number of different ways and often occur in specific co-texts. The present paper...Show moreContrastive focus reduplication (CR) is one of many types of reduplication. CR constructions can be interpreted in a number of different ways and often occur in specific co-texts. The present paper presents a quantitative investigation into CR in Dutch, taking data from a questionnaire containing constructed examples of CR in which participants were asked to share how they interpret the examples and whether they would use them themselves. Specifically, the following aspects are investigated: interpretation, co-text, age of the participant, and gender of the participant. Furthermore, the concept of receptivity (from multilingualism studies) is introduced, which helps explain why participants understand constructions they would not use themselves. It emerges that there are correlations between certain characteristic types of co-texts and CR interpretations, i.e. certain co-texts tend to result in certain readings. In terms of interpreting CRs, age does not turn out to play a role. It does play a role, however, in the likelihood of participants using these constructions, as older participants tend to consider it less likely that they would. Finally, gender does not play a role in the interpretation nor in the likelihood of participants using the CR examples.Show less
