CRC 1412/1: “Expressive” Dislocation and Register in Czech vs. Russian (SP A03)

The project investigates syntactic variation in Czech and Russian in connection with register by analysing different types of dislocated constituents. The project will fill important gaps in prior research on syntactic register variation in the two languages. It will first approach register by a bottom-up analysis of the (non-)occurrence of selected linguistic features across text types. Then it will experimentally investigate the appropriateness of register-related dimensions ascribed to particular linguistic behaviour with a matched-guise study. A further step will explore the acceptability of the dislocation phenomena in a series of experiments building on the initial corpus analysis, followed by theoretical modelling in a way which makes explicit relations between register-related, grammatical and information-structural restrictions on word order.