Avoiding Agency

The grammars of Russian and English are strikingly different in the way that they code many expressions of human experiences. Russian lacks modal verbs which would code a human experiencer as the Nominative subject of a sentence. The lone exception here is мочь ‘be able’. On the other hand, Russian has a rich system of impersonal constructions in which the experiencer appears in the dative case, as in мне холодно/48 лет, literally, ‘to me it is cold/48 years’. By contrast, English has plenty of modal verbs, and a much stronger tendency to use constructions with personal subjects, as we see in the English equivalents: I’m cold/48 yrs old. As a result, we often see that the same objective experience is encoded differently by the two languages, so feeling like sleeping is something that happens to a person if you are speaking Russian, as in Мне хочется спать, literally ‘to me wants to sleep’. But feeling like sleeping is something someone DOES in English, as in I feel like sleeping. Given this strong grammatical difference between the two languages, we wondered whether it might influence the way that speakers of Russian and speakers of English think about the experiences that are encoded differently by these two languages, and that is the point of our talk: do speakers of Russian and English think differently for speaking?

Thinking for speaking is a term suggested by Dan Slobin to describe differences in how speakers of different types of languages attend to various components of objective reality. The most salient example comes from verb-framed languages and satellite-framed languages. Verb-framed languages are languages like French and Spanish encode path in the verb and manner of motion in an adverbial, as in entró corriendo ‘(he) ran in’, which could be rendered more literally as ‘he entered running’. Satellite-framed languages are languages like Russian and English that code the manner on the verb and the path separately, as in вбежал ‘he ran in’. There is evidence that speakers of verb-framed languages tend to use path verbs when describing the same experience that evokes manner verbs from speakers of satellite-framed languages. This is probably because a verb-framed language constantly focuses attention on the path of motion, whereas a satellite-framed language focuses attention on the manner of motion. This type of phenomenon should not be specific to just motion. There are many ways in which different languages differ in the attention they require speakers to pay to various properties that are grammaticalized in that language. We wondered whether we could find evidence of differences in “speaking for thinking” for the difference in impersonal vs personal constructions in Russian vs. English too.

In our experiment, we looked at two kinds of Russian verbs, both of which appear in impersonal constructions that contain an infinitive. We tested six verbs in each group. The first group includes verbs like грозило ‘be in danger of’, идет ‘look good’, which can appear in constructions like Мне грозило улететь в кювет. ‘I was in danger of flying into the ditch.’ where there is a slot for a nominative (one can say Мне грозил штраф ‘A fine threatened me’), and that nominative slot has been filled by an infinitive form, in our example улететь. In this first group the item marked by the dative case in Russian is a true experiencer. In the second group there is no possibility of a nominative slot and the dative behaves semantically more like a subject, as in our example cited above: Мне хотелось бы порадовать моих девчонок. ‘I’d like to make my girls happy.’

We wanted to know whether speakers of Russian think about the causes of experiences coded in the dative in their language differently from speakers of English. We reasoned that Russian speakers might be less likely to accept the logical subject as the cause of these experiences and might be more likely to attribute these experiences to an object or external circumstances. Our experiment asked participants to rate the discourse cohesion (how well various sentences go together) for three types of instigators for a given trigger, such as Мне хотелось бы порадовать моих девчонок. ‘I’d like to make my girls happy.’ The first type identifies the logical subject as the instigator, as we see in the example, where the father appears as the cause of this desire, as in: Я - хороший отец ‘I’m a good father…’. The second type selects the object as the instigator, here it is the girls and their good grades, as in В школе они получили только пятерки ‘They got the best grades in school. And the third type selects a circumstance, such as a holiday, as in Новый год был близок ‘New Year’s day was near…’.

Here is how we designed this experiment: We constructed three sentences for each of the twelve verbs. Then for each sentence, we wrote three possible continuation sentences, one that identified the logical subject as the cause, one that assigned the cause to an object, and one that pointed to a circumstance as a cause. Each of these combinations constituted a trigger item. We then composed 36 different questionnaires for each language, and each questionnaire contained: 6 benchmark sentences (3 at the beginning and 3 at the end, to provide training and to test participant reliability) 12 filler sentences (with similar types of constructions) to prevent participants from guessing what we were testing 6 Trigger sentences, which contained the independent variables. The fillers and triggers were presented in randomized order. The English questionnaires were completed by 36 college students in their classes, whereas the Russian questionnaires were completed by native speakers who volunteered over the internet, most of whom live in the US and teach Russian as their profession.

This experiment thus contained two kinds of independent variables: The type of experiencer, which could be True Experiencer or Agentive Experiencer The type of instigator, which could be Subject, Object, or Circumstance As already mentioned we had twelve verbs and created 3 different token sets per verb in order to avoid lexical effects. The dependent variable was discourse coherence, which was measured by participants on a 5-point Likert scale, from minus two to plus two.

Discussion. Well, we didn’t find any statistically significant results, but we wonder whether this is because there really is no difference between the thinking for speaking of Russian and English in terms of egocentricity or not. Could it be that there is a difference, but we simply did not find it because we did not know where to look? We wonder whether it might be possible to find an effect if we looked elsewhere. Perhaps we could find some difference in the discourse environments of our constructions in major corpora, such as the British National Corpus and the Russian National Corpus? Maybe we could show that the Russian Corpus has more examples of these constructions in contexts that identify circumstances as the causes, but English has more examples of contexts that identify subjects in this role? Another possibility is that our experimental design was inadequate. Perhaps we would need to come up with another type of task or another measure? If you have any suggestions, we would be delighted to hear them. Thank you!