ИСТИНА

The paper addresses the intralingual variation in Tatar postpositional phrases, which allow various case marking and agreement patterns. In order to investigate the distribution of grammatical variants we conducted elicited production and acceptability judgement experiments with the same speaker sample and compared the experimental data against frequencies of occurrence in corpus. We found that the minor grammatical patterns attested only sporadically in corpus were elucidated in experiments. The experimental methods themselves differ in sensitivity: the elicited production is better in fixing deviation from the major grammatical pattern; the acceptability judgements help estimate to what extent a grammatical innovation is established. The analysis of inconsistency between the results of the two experiments allows us to determine the direction of language change.