Intrusive pronouns in Russian: An experimental study

Dmitry Petelin
National Research University Higher School of Economics

Abstract. This paper examines the acceptability of intrusive pronouns in Russian. Intrusive pronouns are pronouns that fill a gap when a constituent is extracted. There is evidence that such pronouns can “repair” sentences in which movement was non-grammatical. The purpose of this work is to study whether intrusive pronouns increase acceptability of island subextraction in Russian using experimental methods. The results of the experiments show that the presence of intrusive pronouns not only does not increase the acceptability but decreases it. In addition, there is a possibility that the difference between acceptability of animate and inanimate constituent extraction can be an indicator of the construction type.

Keywords: Intrusive pronouns, resumption, island constraints, Russian, experimental syntax, acceptability judgments, Likert scale, forced-choice, graduality

For citation: Petelin D. Intrusive pronouns in Russian: An experimental study. Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters. 2021. Vol. 4, iss. 2. Pp. 98–127.