Federica Longo (UniMe): ‘The acquisition of modal particles in Russian: a corpus-based study’

Seminari del CLT

Divendres, 27 de febrer de 2026
Hora 15:30
Aula 202, Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres

Abstract:
This talk is concerned with the acquisition and early use of modal particles (MPs) in Russian. MPs are non-obligatory elements that convey the speaker’s epistemic stance and subjective attitudes without altering the truth-conditional content of the utterance (Zimmermann, 2011; Švedova, 1980; Rozental’ et al., 1990; a.o.). As such, MPs may serve as indicators of early pragmatic competence. Despite their theoretical relevance, research on MP acquisition remains remarkably scarce. To date, only Döpke (1999) examined child acquisition, reporting early production of German MPs around age 2;0 – though in German-English bilingual children, limiting generalizability to monolingual acquisition.

The present study investigates the emergence and early use of the MPs ved’, ž/že, and už in a Russian-speaking monolingual child through longitudinal corpus analysis, focusing on the age at which MPs are first attested, their developmental trajectories, and the role of child-directed speech frequency in child production. Data come from the Russian Protassova Corpus (CHILDES; MacWhinney, 2000), spanning age 1;06.05–2;10.14.

All three MPs were first attested in child production at age 2;00.01, despite substantial adult input in five earlier recordings, aligning with Döpke’s findings on German. Developmental trajectories differed substantially: ž/že exhibited the highest frequency (mean 4.51/1,000 tokens) with a sharp non-linear increase; ved’ showed gradual growth (mean 1.27/1,000 tokens); už remained consistently low (mean 0.32/1,000 tokens). A significant correlation between child-directed speech and child production frequencies (p = .03) indicates that more frequent particles in adult speech were produced more frequently by the child.

Taken together, these findings suggest that Russian MPs emerge early in development and that MP frequency in child-directed speech plays an important role in shaping acquisition patterns.