Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present study focuses on a type of seemingly arbitrary alternation in modern Russian. Specifically, we investigate the phenomenon of Complementizer Omission, i.e. the alternation between the presence and absence of complementizer with regard to the factors that potentially exert an influence on the alternation in Russian. The choice of alternating pairs is statistically modeled with mixed-effects logistic regression. We find that the complementizer is more likely to be absent in Russian when the matrix subject is a first-or-second-person pronoun, the matrix predicate has a high frequency and the onset of the complement clause is non-ambiguous and non-informational. The findings align well with the Grammaticalization theory, according to which the distribution of complementizer is partially driven by certain types of combinations of matrix subjects and verbs that have become grammaticalized as epistemic markers. Moreover, we argue that the results provide weak support for ambiguity avoidance at the general syntactic level and that the Uniform Information Density account more fully explains the alternation than the Availability account. As in Jaeger and Norcliffe (2009), we propose that more cross-linguistic research should be done on syntactic alternations as "even similar constructions may be processed differently in different languages".