XLVI. StuTS 

Frequential and Positional Patterns of Attributive Participles in Russian and German

Abstract:

This talk is concerned with the differing distributional and frequential properties of attributive participles in Russian and German. On the basis of an analysis of three corpora, it is shown that Russian makes more extensive use of participial constructions and has a larger ratio of complex participles than German. The main reason for that is those languages’ differing ability to use attributive participles behind their head noun. Russian can do so, while German cannot, which leads to an increase in the former’s probability to use participles and a decrease for the latter, possibly in interaction with Behaghel’s (1909) “Law of Increasing Terms”. As another influencing factor, though of less importance, I identify the smaller amount of types of participles in German, which decreases the construction’s expressional force in terms of the possible range of applications.

Selected Literature:

Babby, L.H. (1978). “Participles in Russian: Attribution, Predication, and Voice”. In International Review of Slavic Linguistics 3,1-2, pp. 5-25.