Sintagmi quantificatori ed espansioni post-nominali : considerazioni sulla concordanza

The paper focuses on case variation (Nominative plural vs Genitive plural) in postnominal modifiers (participial and more rarely adjectival) of quantified phrases, such as dve barži, poterpevšie [..] or tri neftjanych barži, svjazannye […] (see Worth 1959 and Comrie 1993). In this kind of construction several issues need to be taken into account: the role of the adjective in indicating the plural, the role of the noun gender, which seems to influence, to some extent, the choice of case, and finally the puzzling alternation of Genitive and Nominative within the numeral phrase and within its expansion. The working hypothesis of this paper is that, notwithstanding the strong (and diachronically or transformationally explained) grammaticalization of patterns like this one, more attention should be paid to speakers’ cognitive effort when using these constructions. Research to date has been based on few empirical data and/or on artificial examples; we assume that a data-driven investigation on large corpora of texts, with a statistical description of the actual speakers’ use, may provide us with new insights into the evolutionary trends of this construction: evidence from the Russian National Corpus (ruscorpora.ru) for the time span 1900-2013, could support an innovative interpretation by shedding more light on how speakers have managed to reduce the effort connected with producing this interesting, albeit contradictory, morphosyntactic pattern.