To inflect, or not to inflect, that is the question: an experimental study of indeclinability in Russian

Abstract

Russian indeclinable nouns were analyzed in several studies based on dictionaries and corpora, but, since this group is relatively small and extremely heterogeneous, some questions remained open. This paper addresses them in two experiments in which participants were asked to provide instrumental singular and locative plural forms from nonce nouns ending in -a, -o, -e, -i, -u. Real nouns ending in -i, -u never decline in Russian, those ending in -a almost always decline. All declinable neuter nouns (a large group) end in -o, -e, but recent borrowings are indeclinable. We received many inflected answers for all stimuli, including those ending in -i, -u. This shows that indeclinability is a strongly dispreferred option in Russian. Even more surprisingly, most declinable answers belonged to the I declension, even for -o, -e nonce nouns. Apparently, if a noun ends in a vowel in nominative singular, I declension patterns are more readily generalized to it. We discuss these findings and possible reasons underlying indeclinability and decreasing productivity of the declinable neuter noun group in Russian.