AGGRESSIVE COLLOQUIAL USAGE OR LANGUAGE NORM EVOLUTION? (INVITATION TO DISCUSSION)

The article is concerned with substitution of synthesis with pronominal correlation (Ja skazal to chto on prid’ot instead Ja skazal chto on prid’ot). The article is a bid for discussion evoked by our coming across a statement that this construction demonstrates “emerging” of a new subordinate conjunction to chto. The arguments supporting that, such as abundance and phonetic fusion of the word pair and the intonation contour of containing phrases are looked upon with a critical eye. In contrast to this “new conjunction” theory the author advocates that it’s nothing but erratic syntax caused by speaker’s hyper-correction. In conclusion a whole range of examples of new conjunctions that truly emerged in colloquial speech, such as ne govor’a o tom chto/chtoby, uchitavaja chto, v tom plane chto, jedinstvenno chto, tipa togo chto, vrode togo chto, etc. is given. The propositions are supported by data from two corpora: The National Corpus of Russian Language (NCRL) and The Sound Corpus (SCRL), which contains two modules — everyday spontaneous speech corpus “One Speaker’s Day” (primarily dialogues and polylogues) and the Balanced Annotated Text Collection (an archive of various monologues). Conjunctiolization in everyday speech appears to be a dynamic enough process to include to chto, but now it seems too early to speak about it.