The role of redundancy of grammatical marking for the speech production processes
Based on spontaneous speech data, the paper proves that redundancy is a basic property of perceived and generated texts. When generating an oral utterance, the speaker relies on the probability of occurrence of certain units to follow those that have been already voiced. This may be evidenced by failures in utterance generation occurring in situations where the grammatical marking of the previous unit appears to be unreliable or ambivalent. For example, this may take place in Russian oral speech during adjectival phrase generation when such phrases include adjectives in a case form that has homonyms in the adjective paradigm. The background of this mechanism (observed in adult speech and based on utterance generation with the use of redundant grammatical category markers) emerges in early pre-school age, at a stage when children only begin to build independent phrases. My analysis of speech failures occurring in the course of adjective combination formation confirms the functional significance of excessive grammatical marking applied to unrelated word forms as a means to maintain coherence and grammatical correctness of an utterance in the process of its generation. In most cases, the described mechanism serves as a reliable tool to support utterance generation at any moment of this process.