Interpretation of Pronouns in Constructions with Ellipsis in Russian

In present study, various explanations for the strict/sloppy identity readings for identity resolution of reflexives in Russian were examined. An experimental study was conducted on materials of Russian language based on the research of Ong and Brasoveanu (2013), in which they explored what factors influence the likelihood of a strict reading in English: syntactic structure (as in Hestvik 1995), the Cause Effect (according to Kehler 2000, 2002) and the implicit causality type of a verb (Ong and Brasoveanu 2013). The results from the 2 experiments with pronominal reflexive sebya and possessive reflexive svoj matched the results from Ong and Brasoveanu (2013): the influence of the coordinate/subordinate connection between clauses was not significant, but the implicit causality verb type proved to be significant. Additionally, some interesting cases of unexpected pronoun identity choices were considered. In this study, another factor that influences the choice of strict reading was proposed and attested — pragmatics, determined by long-distance context. Keywords: reflexives; ellipsis; identity condition; sloppy reading; strict reading