Nº 6 (2025)

The presence of the genitive plural suppletive form let in the paradigm of the noun god ‘year’ distinguishes Russian from other East Slavic languages. In Russian dialects, instead of let, the dialect variant godov is sometimes used. Data from the panchronic subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus show that the form godov, which is first attested in the 15^th century, was peripheral throughout the history of the Russian language. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries it was mainly used in non-fiction texts, while in the 19^th century it was already considered as outdated or dialectal. In modern dialect data, the variant godov is highly frequent: it is present in almost half of about 2,000 contexts considered. The article aims to investigate the factors that influence the probability of using the dialect variant godov in constructions with cardinal numeral in modern dialects of Russian. The dialect variant is frequent in different dialect groups, which does not support an analysis of variation in terms of areal distribution. Moreover, variation between the two forms differs even among speakers of the same dialect, which makes the data particularly suitable to a variationist analysis. Data annotation included the following sociolinguistic parameters: gender, year of birth, and level of education. In addition, we tagged each data point according to the case form of the numeral and word order. The significance of these variables was evaluated with a mixed effect logistic regression. The results of statistical analysis showed that the probability of using the dialect form is much higher for less educated speakers as compared to more educated ones. Inverse word order and genitive case form of the numeral also increase the probability of using the dialect variant.

Modern descriptive grammars including the “Anthropocentric Danish grammar” (2024) edited by Dina B. Nikulicheva often contain claims that language-specific features of the object language prompt the implementation of general theories of a certain kind, e.g. cognitive or functional. I argue that linguistic traditions focusing on particular languages, e.g. Danish or Russian, contribute to language theory by generalizing empirical observations on the language-specific datasets and providing the models that are potentially applicable to a wider class of the world's languages. However, the constructs of the type 'a language like L (Danish, Russian, etc.)', 'a language of the analytic type' are not operational, and a linguist must check every grammatical parameter and correlation between different parameters based on language samples. The book under review provides reliable descriptions of the fragments of Danish grammar related to deictic categories and encoding of epistemic and evidential meanings.