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In the spring of 1995 a linguistic experiment, a
so-called "cloze test", was carried out in Moscow, Arkhangelsk and
Severodvinsk. Native speakers of Russian, mostly students and teachers,
were presented with short literary texts, in which every fifth word had
been excluded. The task consisted in guessing what word had been
excluded in each slot. As a result a large number of guesses were
obtained, and the author's aim has been to compare the proposed
variants, including the original word, of every slot, thus trying to
describe the possible relationships from a purely linguistic point of
view.
The relationship holding between two guesses is
characterised according to three criteria: a) whether the words have
the same syntactic function or not; b) whether the words belong to the
same part of speech (word-class) or not; and c) whether the words are
compatible in the same slot or not (in the case of compatibility there
may by restrictions on word order).
The application of these three binary criteria
gives eight groups, or types of relationship, all of which turn out to
be represented in the material. The presentation of each type consists
of two parts: a number of examples and commentaries containing
additional grammatical and semantic analysis.
Publication: O gibkosti
russkogo teksta. Opyt lingvisticheskogo eksperimenta. Nordlyd 25,
1997, pp. 36-46.
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