Predictability and syntactic production: Evidence from subject omission in Russian

The quantitative study of the role of communicative efficiency in language production and comprehension has gained increasing attention recently. However, in online production most investigation has focused on the phonetic/phonological level, leaving open the question of whether the communicative pressures involved extend to the syntactic level. I present a corpus study which investigates the omission of optional clause subjects in Russian. If speakers communicate efficiently, then they are expected to preferentially omit elements that are more predictable, given preceding context. However, at the syntactic level this has only been directly demonstrated for omission of functional elements. The present study shows that even when other predictors of subject omission are taken into account, contextual predictability remains a significant predictor of whether an optional subject, a relatively complex syntactic constituent, is pronounced. This supports the hypothesis that the drive towards efficient communication is a general principle of language production.