ИСТИНА

Predicate agreement with conjoint subjects is known to fall into three patterns: resolution (in accordance with the personal hierarchy), closest conjunct agreement (CCA, including first conjunct agreement, second conjunct agreement and higher conjunct agreement) and default agreement. It is also widely described that VS word order favorizes the CCA even in languages in which the main agreement pattern is resolution. Russian is such a language; however, all the conclusions about it were based on corpus or introspection and there were no experimental researches containing all three agreement possibilities. Thus, we conducted two experiments (SVO and OVS) aiming to investigate the acceptability of different patterns of personal agreement with conjoint pronouns. Experimental designs contained two factors: conjunct order (“I and you” / “you and I”) and predicate form (1pl, 1sg, 2sg and 3pl). We used the Likert scale 1–7 and self-paced reading to collect judgements; each experiment contained 32 test stimuli and 32 fillers. The results show that although the resolution agreement has the highest rating, OVS order does indeed facilitate the CCA. The reading time, on the other hand, did not confirm our hypothesis: we would expect, that a verb in SV-order and a first conjunct in VS-order would demand more time to read when a predicate form differs in person. However, we do not see any statistically significant differences. According to the other hypothesis, the “and”-conjunction should be red slower when a verb agrees with a first conjunct, but it does not hold either. We suppose that this is a result of methodological issues: as all the words used are very short, it influences reader’s rhythm of passing the experiment.