Surrey Database of Short Term Morphosyntactic Change: Predicate agreement with conjoined noun phrases

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.

Conjoined noun phrases may take either a singular or a plural predicate. The database
documents this variation with respect to these factors: the noun’s lexical semantics
(animacy and concreteness/abstractness), the noun’s morphosyntactic properties
(gender and number), verb characteristics (such as transitivity contrasts and the
activity/state contrast), word order (namely, subject-verb or verb-subject) and the
structure of the conjuncts (number of subjects, presence of common modifier). These
factors are known to apply cross-linguistically (Corbett 2006). The database also
provides information on how the semantic relationships between conjoined subjects
affect predicate number: the database provides statistics of morphosyntactic choices
with respect to each type of conjunction (co-ordinate, disjunctive, adversative) and
for asyndetic conjoined noun phrases.