THE ORIGINS OF THE EARLY CLOSURE BAN IN THE RUSSIAN LITERARY STANDARD

Abstract

: The Early and Late Closure phenomenon has been present in the psycholinguistic spotlight since the 1970s. Decades of research on the topic have shown not only that resolving attachment ambiguity is influenced by such factors as the length of the relative clause and speaker’s working-memory capacity, but that speakers of different languages tend to prefer either Early or Late Closure. Investigations of attachment ambiguity in Russian have come to the conclusion that Russian is a language with a preference towards Early Closure. However, during the trials some speakers of Russian claim that high attachment is ungrammatical and justify their view by some kind of grammatical rule they have been taught in school. The origins of this supposed rule have so far been unknown. The article at hand shows that the Early Closure Ban in literary Russian has its roots in works on Russian grammar that date back to the early 19th century. This rule evolved from a simple generalization of the linear position of relative clauses to an outright ban which came to life with the advent of Soviet mass media. Such stylistic guidelines in other literary standards are theorized to be factors which need to be accounted for when conducting research on attachment ambiguity in languages of the world.