A long birth: The development of gender-specific paucal constructions in Russian

Abstract

This article investigates the diachronic development of Russian numeral constructions consisting of a paucal numeral (<i>dva</i> “two”, <i>tri</i> “three”, <i>četyre</i> “four”) followed by an adjective and a noun. Based on statistical analysis of more than 6,000 corpus examples, it is shown that a split took place in the second half of the twentieth century when feminine nouns developed a dif- ferent agreement pattern from that of masculine and neuter nouns. This split is argued to represent the final step in a long “birth process” of gender- specific paucal constructions that started with the loss of the dual in the Middle Ages. It is suggested that we are witnessing a cascading effect, whereby the feminine pattern develops when the pattern for masculine and neuter nouns is approaching stabilization. The article furthermore includes a discussion of the hypothesis that “S-curves” represent a template for lan- guage change. While the documented changes resemble S-curves, the pro- posed analysis also addresses some general problems with testing the S- curve hypothesis empirically.