Syntactic profiles of style in Russian

Abstract Analysis of case usage in Russian provides quantitatively verifiable ‘syntactic profiles’ of three styles in Russian. They are: spoken, belletristic, and technical. These differences in case usage are shown to be a function of the differing role of marked ‘shifters’. When the verb evinces a high degree of marked verbal shifters (spoken dialogue) the case system is heavily dominated by unmarked cases, particularly the nominative. When verbal shifters are absent or unmarked (technical prose), the reverse is observed, and the case system evinces a high degree of usage of marked, i.e. oblique cases, in particular the genetive. In these regards Russian belletristic prose occupies a middle ground and appears to be diachronically quite stable. The fact that, within the sentence, marked values tend to be either nominal or verbal, but not both, is viewed as a syntagmatic corollary of Stankiewicz' principle of paradigmatic limitation of co-occurrence of marked values.