Replication data for: Constructions and language change: From genitive to accusative objects in Russian

This article reports on a corpus study of ongoing language change in Russian, whereby genitive-governing verbs like bojat’sja “fear” combine with objects in the accusative in addition to the traditionally normative genitive. While the use of the accusative is still not very frequent in Contemporary Standard Russian, we demonstrate that it is increasing and that a number of factors such as individuation (animacy), grammatical voice, frequency and verb semantics (intensionality and directionality) promote the use of the accusative. Our analysis is couched in Construction Grammar, and we show that the shift from genitive to accusative objects in Russian provides empirical support for Construction Grammar as a theory applicable to language change.

本文报道了对俄语持续语言变化的一次语料库研究，其中所有格支配动词如bojat’sja（恐惧）不仅与传统的所有格宾语结合，还与宾格宾语结合。尽管在当代标准俄语中，使用宾格并不常见，但我们证明了其使用频率正在增加，并指出诸如个体化（有生命性）、语法语态、频率及动词语义（内涵性和方向性）等因素都促进了宾格的使用。本研究采用构造语法方法，并展示了俄语中从所有格向宾格宾语的转变，为构造语法作为一种适用于语言变化的理论提供了实证支持。