This page intentionally left blank AReference Grammar of Russian AReference Grammar of Russian describes and systematizes all aspects of the grammar of Russian: the patterns of orthography, sounds, inflection, syntax, tense-aspect-mood, word order, and intonation. It is especially concerned with the meaning of combinations of words (constructions). The core concept is that of the predicate history: a record of the states of entities through time and across possibilities. Using predicate histories, the book presents an integrated account of the semantics of verbs, nouns, case, and aspect. More attention is paid to syntax than in any other grammars of Russian written in English or in other languages of Western Europe. Alan Timberlake refers to the literature on variation and trends in development, and makes use of contemporary data from the internet. This book will appeal to students, scholars, and language professionals interested in Russian. alan timberlake is Professor of Slavic Linguistics at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of The Nominative Object in Slavic, Baltic, and West Finnic (1974) and editor of The Scope of Slavic Aspect (with M. S. Flier, 1985), American Contributions to the Eleventh International Congress of Slavists (with Robert A. Maguire, 1993), and American Contributions to the Twelfth International Congress of Slavists (with Robert Maguire, 1998). AReference Grammar of Russian ALAN TIMBERLAKE University of California at Berkeley cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK First published in print format isbn-13 978-0-521-77292-1 isbn-13 978-0-511-16446-0 © Alan Timberlake 2004 2004 Information on this title: www.cambrid g e.or g /9780521772921 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. isbn-10 0-511-16446-7 isbn-10 0-521-77292-3 Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org hardback eBook (EBL) eBook (EBL) hardback Contents 1 Russian 1 2 Sounds 28 3 Inflectional morphology 92 4 Arguments159 5 Predicates and arguments 270 6 Mood, tense, and aspect 371 7 The presentation of information 444 Bibliography 473 Index 493 v 1 Russian 1.1 The Russian language 1.1.1 Russian then and now The present study is a comprehensive description of all aspects (except word derivation) of modern standard Russian: its sounds, spelling, grammar, and syntax. Russian has resulted from a long evolution that can be traced back to the first millennium of our era. From the fifth century on, speakers of Slavic established settlements over a vast area of Central and Eastern Europe, from the Danube in the south to the Elbe in the northwest. In the east, they moved north from the Dnepr valley to the Gulf of Finland and the Upper Volga, gradually displacing or assimilating the previous Baltic and Finnic inhabitants. 1 Russian developed from the dialects of Slavic spoken in the north of this East Slavic territory. In the ninth century, the East Slavic area came under control of Scandinavian merchant-warriors. The Christianization of this land in 988 was followed by subjugation to “the Mongol yoke” from the thirteenth century into the fifteenth century. As the favored agent of the Golden Horde, the once small principality of Moscow brought ever more land under its control. By the end of the fifteenth century, when the Mongol yoke was definitively removed, Moscow had become the political and ecclesiastical center of the East Slavic lands, and the center of the Russian language area. Russian is not only a spoken language, but a written language used for all cultural purposes. The modern form of Russian took shape over the course of the eighteenth century. The morphology and phonology is based on the dialect of Moscow. In its vocabulary, syntax, and rhetoric, Russian, while relying on native Slavic elements, has a long history of adapting and internalizing foreign Byzantine, French, and most recently English models. Parenthetically, it could be noted that the modern word héccrbq ‘Russian’ is an adjective deriving from the noun Hécm ‘Rus’. According to a venerable etymology, 1 See Sedov 1982 on the complex archeological record of the East Slavic area. 1 2 AReference Grammar of Russian Hécm wasadescriptive name for Scandinavians that is based on the Germanic et- ymon ‘to row’, the Scandinavians being above all oarsmen. 2 In East Slavic lands, Hécm was used initially for the Scandinavian overlords and their principality of Kiev. Over time it was extended to all East Slavic lands. Muscovy appropri- ated the name for its political identity, culture, and language as it consolidated power. Russian is the first language of approximately 150 million people. According to an estimate for 2002 the Russian Federation had a total population of 145 mil- lion people, among whom 81.5 percent, or 118 million, were ethnic Russians. 3 In the mid-nineties, there were an additional 25 million Russians in the newly in- dependent countries that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union (Novaia Rossiia 1994). Together that would make 143 million ethnic Russians. To that figure could be added a substantial though indeterminate percentage of the remaining 27 million members of other nationalities residing in the Russian Federation. According to recent statistics, the rate of population growth in the Russian Federation is negative (−0.33%), from which it would follow that the number of speakers of Russian will not increase in the foreseeable future. 1.1.2 Levels of language Russian is a spoken language and a written language. In its written form Rus- sian has long been highly codified: grammars, dictionaries, and manuals define standards for usage that are enforced in the educational system and through editorial practices in publication. Although the Russian tradition is quite clear about what usage counts as standard, it does acknowledge the existence of a range of varieties, or registers,from archaic to bookish to standard (normative) to colloquial (hfpujdjhyfz htxm)tosubstandard and uncultured (ghjcnjhtxbt). The grammar recorded here is the normative grammar of standard, written Russian, which is the culturally privileged, and also the most accessible, form of Russian. Occasionally, there are asides on usage in less-than-standard or oral language, but this study cannot treat colloquial Russian with the same attention as the works of E. A. Zemskaia and colleagues, 4 which have documented the sig- nificant differences between spontaneous spoken Russian and formal, written Russian. 2 Possible candidates are Ro þ er, Ro þ in,former names for Sweden’s Uppland region, and ro þ s- ‘oar’, thegenitive form used in compounding (Thomsen 1879:99 104, also Vasmer 1986 87:s.v. Hecm,de Vries 1962: s.v. rj´ ð r,Schenker 1995:57 60). A form of this etymon was adopted into West Finnic languages (Finnish ruotsi ‘Sweden’) and into Slavic, and then found its way into Greek ( < ς ) and Arabic (r ¯ us) sources from the ninth and tenth centuries. 3 At: http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/rs.html#People. 4 Zemskaia 1973, 1978, 1983; Zemskaia and Shmelev 1984; see also Timroth 1986. [...]... still palpable change in the mores of language Unedited, informal texts of written Russian of a type that would never have become public during the days of active Soviet censorship are now available in print and especially electronic form And yet, despite political changes and a loosening of speech manners, contemporary Russian in its grammatical structure remains Russian 1.2 Describing Russian grammar. .. usage (there are too many variables; speakers have some freedom in how they rank and evaluate variables) What can be done is to point out the general, holistic value of a construction, and, often, some tangible linguistic features that are consistent with that holistic value that will inuence choices 9 10 A Reference Grammar of Russian 1.2.6 Two fundamental concepts of (Russian) grammar While each construction,... the speaker invites the addressee to engage in a directional process of manipulating information These concepts modality (and quantication) and directionality pervade the grammar of Russian and, no doubt, other languages 1.3 Writing Russian 1.3.1 The Russian Cyrillic alphabet Russian is written not in the Latin letters used for English and Western European languages but in an alphabet called Cyrillic... dictionary of A A Zalizniak (1977 [a] ), with 100,000 entries arranged in reverse alphabetical order, is denitive Entries of the dictionary are indexed with paradigm numbers; exceptions are marked The 142 introductory pages list paradigms with accentual contours A variety of grammars is available, including two compact grammars in English (Unbegaun 1957, Wade 1992), which, however, do not treat syntax extensively,... approach says nothing about how speakers make choices As an alternative, one can look for as many tangible variables as possible variables such as the number of a noun, its position relative to the verb, the aspect of the verb and measure their statistical contribution But the result of a variable rule is only a probability, which does not explain how a speaker works with a half dozen to a dozen factors... that Russian must be a difcult language because its alphabet is so difcult Nothing could be further from the truth Whatever the difculties of Russian, they cannot be blamed on the alphabet, which anyone with a modicum of ability in language systems and a vague acquaintance with the Greek alphabet can learn in half an hour, as will be demonstrated after a brief introduction to the history of the alphabet... simplifying and domesticating proper names is becoming widespread In brief, each system has an advantage and a correlated disadvantage The British System has a more congenial way of rendering z and / than the Library of Congress system, but does not have a good solution to s The Library of Congress handles s, but creates off-putting sequences such as Ialta The US Board on Geographic Names of The American Geographic... that make it less than ideal as a corpus: (a) the relative weight of genres www.libr.ru is heavy on literary texts and translations (if one has hesitations about translations), while the web as a whole has a random mix of commercial writing, personal travelogues, detailed histories of the repair records of automobiles, journalism, and religious texts; (b) the quality of Russian, which includes translations,... bvtyb Graham Mack lb-l;tbk ct,t, lb-l;tbk, lf nfr b ljlbl;tbkcz, xnj c hflbj eitk A certain Birmingham DJ, named Graham Mack, DJ-ed, DJ-ed, and so DJ-ed out, that he had to leave the radio station This internationalized vocabulary now dominates the linguistic landscape, just as Soviet-speak used to dominate language a half century ago Along with these changes in vocabulary has come a less quantiable but... signicant obstruction of the air ow (such as [t], [z ]) -and sonorants (such as the nasal [n], the liquid [l], the glide [j]) Russian phonology revolves primarily around two concerns: stress in vowels and palatalization in consonants.2 Palatalization is an articulation of a consonant in which the blade of the tongue moves toward the hard palate For example, when the non-palatalized l sound of wk (wksq) whole . This page intentionally left blank AReference Grammar of Russian AReference Grammar of Russian describes and systematizes all aspects of the grammar of Russian: the patterns of orthography, sounds,. Slavic area. 1 2 AReference Grammar of Russian Hécm wasadescriptive name for Scandinavians that is based on the Germanic et- ymon ‘to row’, the Scandinavians being above all oarsmen. 2 In East. Moscow had become the political and ecclesiastical center of the East Slavic lands, and the center of the Russian language area. Russian is not only a spoken language, but a written language used