Do Russian paucal numerals govern the genitive? Evidence from stress placement

Abstract

A long-standing issue in Russian linguistics concerns the noun in paucal constructions like dva goroda ‘two cities’. Is goroda the genitive singular of gorod, a separate ‘numerative case form’, or a ‘paucal number’? Although stress has figured prominently in the debate, corpus data and informant data regarding stress have received little attention. Based on the accentuated part of the Russian National Corpus and two experiments, our article addresses stress in rjad ‘row’, sled ‘trace’, cas ‘hour’, sag ‘step’ and sar ‘sphere, ball’, as well as nouns in which the genitive singular and the nominative plural have identical endings, but different stress placement (e.g. storona ‘side’). First, it is demonstrated that a small group of nouns (rjad, cas, and storona) frequently display stress placement that deviates from the genitive, but that the majority of nouns show genitive stress. Second, an analysis in terms of morphological overdifferentiation is proposed, which accommodates the attested examples of non-genitive stress without abandoning the main rule that paucal numerals normally combine with nouns in the genitive singular. Third, substantivized adjectives and adjectival agreement are argued not to be at variance with the analysis. Finally, it is suggested that the relevant generalizations can be represented in Construction Grammar.