Tendencies in the use of full participles in the Russian written discourse: semantics and pragmatics of non-standard patterns

The paper studies tendencies in the use of full, single (i.e., occurring without their arguments) redundant participles in the attributive position in Russian written discourse. Relying upon the data of the Russian National Corpus and the Corpus of Russian Student Texts, as well as on a number of examples collected from various written sources, the prevalent types of the use of redundant participles and their semantic, grammatical, pragmatic, and communicative effects are described. The first of the four identified types is the redundant, anaphoric use of participles where they refer to certain fragments of the previous discourse. Type two represents unnecessary use of appositive participles meant to explicate some presupposed information even though it has been already conveyed by the main clause. Type three emerges where appositive participles break the basic information structure in that they either convey some new information or actualize information that has been already introduced in the previous discourse. Type four is found where the speaker provides redundant quantification information by inserting participles derived from verbs like suščestvovat’, imet’sja ‘exist’, ‘be available’, etc. Moreover, the use of redundant participles express definiteness, aspectual or taxis meanings are described, as well. The paper looks into the reasons that underlie the varying linguistic phenomena. It demonstrates that these include the mutual interference of the strategies of oral and written discourses, as well as the influence of official, business, or neutral speech patterns. Moreover, in many cases redundant participles are formed from fixed word combinations (collocations). The speakers use such ready-made combinations that are (semi-)automatically available to them in their vocabulary. The authors argue that the use of such pleonastic participles may be considered as a manifestation of some ongoing grammaticalization processes.