Surrey Database of Short Term Morphosyntactic Change: Predicate agreement with quantified expression

The notion of 'short term morphosyntactic change' can be used to characterise changes
in the use of forms in a short period of time even when the forms themselves have
changed relatively little. The Short Term Morphosyntactic Change (STMC) Databases
explore change in six different morphosyntactic phenomena in Russian over a 200 year
period from 1801-2000.

Predicates whose agreement controller is a quantified expression may take either
singular or plural agreement. Predicate agreement with quantified expressions shows
significant variability synchronically, determined by the quantifier type, the word
order, and the lexical semantics of the noun and of the verb. Statistics derived from
the corpus reveal a complex relationship between these factors. The quantifier type
is a dominant condition: low numerals favour plural agreement overall, higher
numerals allow variation, conditioned by word order and animacy. Word order, or
precedence (Corbett 2006) is the second most important agreement condition:
subject-predicate word order favours plural predicates irrespective of the subject
noun’s lexical semantics. Animate subjects show stronger preference for plural
agreement than inanimate. Animacy however does not override word order: with
subject-verb word order plural predicates are more frequent irrespective of the
subject noun’s lexical semantics. Finally, the variation in question is subject to
the Predicate Hierarchy of Individuation (Robblee 1997) : verbs that take more
individuated arguments, namely activity (agentive) verbs are more likely to agree in
the plural than are verbs of state. Diachronic analysis shows an unusual undulating
type change: a fall in one period can be followed by a rise in the succeeding one.