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Many thanks to four anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback. Part of this work was presented at NWAV (New Ways of Analyzing Variation) 33, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Slavic Linguistics Society 1, Bloomington, Indiana.
The aim of the present article is to identify factors influencing the choice of the adversative conjunction (da, no, and odnako) in Russian using multivariate analysis of corpus data from the Ogonek Corpus, a collection of magazine articles and interviews written between 1996 and 2000 (Berger, Betsch, & Bremer, 2001). Following Poplack and Tagliamonte (1996) and Torres Cacoullos and Schwenter (2008), I make the case for using quantitative variationist methods to study semantic differences between constructions. Implications for semantics, productivity, and sentence processing are drawn by examining the consequences of the conjunctions' patterns of distribution for perception and production. Although previous work has attempted to determine "the degree to which each [variant] may appropriately be characterized as marking a given function" (Poplack & Tagliamonte, 1996:72), the aim of the present article is to connect the results of the quantitative analysis to both the extent to which a particular form signals a particular meaning/function for the listener and the extent to which a speaker is likely to use the form to express the meaning/function in question, both of which are essential to "reveal the true relationship between form and function," as noted by Poplack and Tagliamonte (1996:72) as well as to make predictions about form productivity (Schwenter & Torres Cacoullos, 2008). Because semantic factors clearly play a role in conjunction choice in Russian and because the use of the variationist method in cases when such differences do or may exist has been controversial (Cheshire, 1987; Lavandera, 1978; Sankoff, 1988), I review the literature on the semantics of adversative conjunctions and justify the application of variationist methods to the study of semantic influences on syntactic variation in the following section.
The semantics of adversatives
Lakoff (1971) identified two basic meanings for the adversative conjunction but in English: the adversative of semantic opposition illustrated by (1) and the denial of expectation adversative illustrated by (2). Unlike in (1), the second conjunct of (2) contradicts certain assumptions that the listener may be expected to make...