Person-Number Agreement with Coordinated Subjects in Russian: Exploring Non-Canonical Variants

This paper investigates person-number agreement with coordinate subjects in Russian, focusing on cases where the conjuncts differ in person. While normative grammars and descriptive studies describe only resolved agreement and closest conjunct agreement in VS word order, corpus and experimental data show that speakers also accept 3rd person agreement patterns that do not follow the person hierarchy 1 > 2 > 3. These agreement patterns receive intermediate acceptability ratings in the experiments. The paper synthesizes existing experimental results on conjunctive subjects and presents new experimental data on disjunctive subjects. Conjoined subjects allow 3rd person plural agreement, whereas disjoined subjects allow both plural and singular 3rd person agreement. Agreement patterns depend on word order and coordination type, with closest conjunct agreement particularly prominent in VS structures with disjunction. I propose a minimalist analysis in which the coordination phrase lacks a person feature, resulting in 3rd person agreement, while resolved agreement is derived via Multiple Agree with conjuncts. The contrast between conjunctive and disjunctive subjects follows from their different feature specifications. The Russian data show that non-canonical agreement patterns are systematic and provide important evidence for the structure of coordination.