Factors Influencing the Anaphoric Third-Person Pronoun Use after the Indefinite Pronoun “Someone”

The paper aims to identify the factors which limit the use of the anaphoric third-person pronoun after ‘someone’. The article analyzes the results of an experiment in which Russian native speakers evaluated sentences with the anaphoric ‘he (she, they)’ with antecedent ‘someone’ in terms of the correct usage of ‘he (she, they)’. The study presents and explains statistically significant dependence of evaluation given by the respondents on formal characteristics of ‘someone’ and ‘he (she, they)’. The scientific originality of the research lies in the fact that it clarifies E. V. Paducheva’s idea of limited opportunities of the pronoun ‘someone’ to be the antecedent of the third-person pronoun. As a result, the study has revealed such factors as numerical characteristics of the third-person pronoun, presence/absence of expressions which in gender and number match the third-person pronoun next to ‘someone’, the syntactic position of ‘someone’.