What Has Changed Za Eti Paru Desyatkov Let (‘Over These Two Couples of Decades’) in the Agreement

The research conducted on Russian written texts studies the phenomenon of the mass use of the plural form of attributes in the case of their agreement with the word form para as part of a quantitative-nominal turn with the meaning of an indefinite quantity. This meaning of the word para is realized when combined with dependent words denoting time periods. The author notes the most frequent constructions with various prepositional-nominals forms of the noun para, in which there are fluctuations in the choice of the grammatical number of the attribute. The research material is media and literary texts in Russian. The sources of the research are the National Corpus of the Russian Language and the electronic media bank Integrum (Media Archive service). The reasons for the speaker's preferential choice of the plural form (za eti paru let) instead of the normative singular are primarily linguistic. The effect of the tendency to semantic agreement and the analogy with the type of agreement implemented in the case of semantically similar turns neskol’ko dney, dva-tri dnya that require an attribute in a plural form belong to them. Extralinguistic factors are also important, and one of them is the reproduction of an error in a text repeatedly reprinted in various media. The study also examines the choice of the numerical form of the predicate with the subject para dney (let, etc.), which, as in the case of the attributes, varies. The author interprets the detected anomalies in the form of unexpressed grammatical markers of gender and case, which are clearly not of a singular nature, as a process of lexicalization of a turn with the word para ‘a few’.

semantic agreement, formal agreement, coordination, Russian language, quantitative-nominal word-combination, quantitative substantive, semantics of uncertainty, numerical grammatical variants, attribute, predicate