Sociolinguistic Variability of Predicate Groups in Colloquial Russian Speech

摘要

The paper is devoted to the study of linear and structural orders in the syntactic constructions of colloquial Russian speech. The quantitative and structural characteristics of predicate groups in the replicas of oral speech are examined with the aim of revealing their typical structures and further analysis in the sociolinguistic aspect. The paper contains the description of typical structures of predicate groups, presents their quantitative analysis and concerns correlation with speakers' social characteristics. The study was based on the material of speech corpus 'One Day of Speech', which is the largest resource for studying spoken language, being developed at St. Petersburg State University. 11 macro episodes of everyday communication for 10 respondents were analyzed, including 5 men and 5 women, who are representatives of 6 different professional groups. Manual syntactic and automatic morphological annotation of predicate groups was carried out and their analysis was conducted. The data obtained were verified using statistical methods and mathematically reliable conclusions were found, such as: (1) the size of predicate groups do not depend on the sex of the speaker; (2) the average size of predicate groups in speech of young people is greater than in that of the middle-aged; (3) the size of predicate groups is changed primarily due to the left distance; (4) the size of the most ranked POS-tagged syntactic structures is only 1-2 elements; (5) the number of verbal predicate groups in the female speech is 8% greater than that in the male.