Asymmetry in Russian metalinguistic comparatives: corpus and experimental evidence

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 their types and various grammatical patterns that they allow. From a morphological point of view, infinitives in meta-comparatives tend to be imperfective, and finite verbs in the subjunctive and indicative mood are generally perfective. From a syntactic point of view, asymmetric meta-comparatives are either bi-clausal, bi-phrasal, or mixed (clausal-phrasal). The bi-phrasal variety shows functional homogeneity. Lučše meta-comparatives are more frequent in the corpus and are evaluated as more grammatical than skoree meta-comparatives. Furthermore, the asymmetric pattern ‘noun phrase + infinitive clause’ is evaluated as more grammatical than the pattern ‘finite clause + infinitive сlause’ for lučše meta-comparatives, while there is no such contrast between these patterns for skoree meta-comparatives. Our study sheds light on the grammatical portrait of Russian meta-comparatives as well as on the use and evaluation of asymmetric meta-comparatives in a natural language in general and thus contributes to the discussion of grammatical asymmetry in parallel syntactic structures, such as comparative and coordinated structures, among others.