"A Tot Perovskoj Ne Dal Vslast' Pospat'": Prosody and Grammar of Anaphoric Tot Through the Lens of Corpus Data

Abstract

Based on data from the Russian National Corpus and the General InternetCorpus of Russian, the paper addresses syntactic, sematic and prosodic features of constructions with the demonstrative TOT used as an anaphor. These constructions have gained some attention in earlier studies [Paducheva 2016], [Berger, Weiss 1987], [Kibrik 2011], [Podlesskaya 2001], but their analysis (a) covered primarily their prototypical uses; and (b) was based on written data. The data from informal, esp. from spoken discourse show however that the actual use of these constructions may deviate considerably from the known prototype. The paper aims at bridging this gap. I claim (i) that the function of TOT is to temporary promote a referent from a less privileged discourse status to a more privileged one; and (ii) that TOT can be analyzed on a par with switch reference devices in the languages where the latter are grammatically marked (e.g. on verb forms). The following parameters of TOT-constructions are discussed: syntactic and semantic roles of TOT and of its antecedent in their respective clauses, linear and structural distances between TOT and its antecedent, animacy of the maintained referent. Special attention is payed to the information structure of the TOT construction: I give structural and prosodic evidence that TOT never has a rhematic status. The revealed actual distribution of TOT (a) adds to our understanding of cross-linguistic variation of anaphoric functions of demonstratives; and, hopefully, (b) may contribute to further developing computational approaches to coreference and anaphora resolution for Russian, e.g. by improving datasets necessary for this task.