Russian 3

Russian has undergone some change since the political and economic turmoil of the late eighties and early nineties, but it is difficult to assess how much. Most tangibly, there have been changes in vocabulary.5 Borrowing and native derivational processes have produced many new words and word combinations, leading to macaronic texts: ytqk-fhn ‘nail-art’, WEB-lbpfqy ‘WEB-design’,

Htrbq ,bhvbyutvcrbq lb-l;tq gj 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 quantifiable but 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

1.2.1 Conventions of notation

The notational conventions employed here are those of Table 1.1.

In the body of the text, Cyrillic words and phrases will be given in italics, and English translations in single quotation marks. Stress is marked in citation forms of words or short phrases; stress is not marked on vowels in fragments of text cited in the text or in set-off numbered examples. In numbered examples, italics and quotations are not used.

1.2.2 Abbreviations

The abbreviations used in this study are listed in Table 1.2.

1.2.3 Dictionaries and grammars

The definitive dictionary of Russian in Russian is the Slovar sovremennogo russkogo literaturnogo iazyka, a seventeen-volume dictionary published over 1950--65. Selfevidently it does not include the numerous new words from the last several decades. Shorter Russian-language dictionaries are fully useful, notably Ozhegov’s one-volume classic, which conveniently lists grammatical forms with stress. More than adequate bilingual dictionaries are the Oxford dictionary (both directions) and now the Novyi Slovar (Russian to English), the most up-to-date

5 Zemskaia 2000.

4A Reference Grammar of Russian

Table 1.1 Conventions used

notation	interpretation
nom sg ntnhƒlm	grammatical gloss and Russian word
ntnhƒlm<nom sg>	alternative grammatical gloss of Russian word
lj<\gen>	grammatical form conditioned by another word (preposition or
	verb)
≤=≥	spelling of letter (or word) in Cyrillic, when spelling is at issue
[ƒ]	sound (from narrow phonetic through broad phonetic to
{ƒ} or {ƒ : ø : ə}	phonemic)
	vowel series, or set of stressed and unstressed vowels related
{-ej} or -tq	by etymology and/or synchronic alternation
	morphological unit
{X : Y}	any relation of elements, notably two stems of verbs,
X Y	{CVC-a-<pst/inf> : CVC-aj-|e|-}<prs>}
	two forms potentially available in the same context
jcnƒnmcz/jcnfdƒnmcz	aspect pair: perfective and secondary (derived) imperfective
vf[ƒnm\vf[yénm	aspect pair: simplex imperfective and semelfactive perfective
(gj)ghjc∫nm or	aspect pair: simplex imperfective and prefixed perfective
ghjc∫nm\gjghjc∫nm
√/ ± / ? /	hierarchy of acceptability judgments: neutral, acceptable,
	frequent / less preferred option / restricted, marginal /
	dubious, ungrammatical

dictionary available. A selection of dictionaries -- Russian only and bilingual -- is available on the web.

Russian dictionaries, unlike many dictionaries of English, do not give information about etymology, for which one should consult the dictionary of Max Vasmer (in its original German edition of 1953 or the Russian edition of 1986--87 revised by O. N. Trubachev), nor about earlier usage, for which one should use Srevnevskii’s “materials” for a dictionary of Old Russian from 1893--1912 (and later reprints), Slovar russkogo iazyka XI--XVII vv., or Slovar russkogo iazyka XVIII veka. Lubensky (1995) should be consulted for Russian idioms.

For grammatical information, the “grammatical dictionary” of A. A. Zalizniak (1977[a]), with 100,000 entries arranged in reverse alphabetical order, is definitive. 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, as well as the multiple generations of “academy grammars” (for example,

Russian

5

Table 1.2 Abbreviations used

abbreviation	interpretation
C / C/ / R / W	set of consonants / obstruents / sonorants / {[v v˛]}
C¸ / C 0	set of palatalized consonants / set of non-palatalized consonants
V / V!/ V*	set of vowels / stressed vowels / unstressed vowels
ˇ	consonant articulations: labial / dental / velar / alveo-palatal
P / T / K / S
C 0 / C j / C i / C i / C i / C i	consonant grades (§2.5.2)
[z˛] / [ür] / [3r]	palatalized [z] / voiceless [r] / voiced [r]
[´a5 ] / [´a5] / [´a55]	[a] fronted in initial transition / final transition / both transitions
ˇrür	articulation in which one feature changes over duration of
	segment
nom / acc / gen / dat /	nominative / accusative / genitive / dative / locative / instrumental
loc / ins
gen1 / gen2 // loc1 / loc2	primary / secondary genitive // primary / secondary locative
nom=acc / acc=gen	syncretism of nominative and accusative (“inanimate accusative”) /
	syncretism of accusative and genitive (“animate accusative”)
sg / pl / du	singular / plural / dual
msc / fem / nt	masculine / feminine / neuter
an / in	animate / inanimate
pv	predicative (= “short”) adjective
nn / qu / adj / pss	noun / quantifier / adjective / possessive
Declension<I>	first declension: Declension<Ia> and Declension<Ib>
Declension<Ia>	first declension (masculine type with nom sg {- }: ,j´,)
Declension<Ib>	first declension (neuter type with nom sg {-o -e}: cnƒlj)
Declension<II>	second declension
Declension<III>	third declension
Declension<IIIa>	third declension (feminine with nom sg {- }: gkj´oflm)
Declension<IIIb>	third declension (neuter with nom sg -z: dh†vz)
Declension<IIIc>	third declension (masculine with nom sg {- }: génm )
R / E / A / F / T / M	stress paradigms -- stress on: root / ending / classificatory suffix
	(verbs) / antethematic syllable / thematic syllable / mobile stress
prs / pst / fut / inf /	present / past / future / infinitive / imperative / irrealis / realis /
imv / irr / rls / pcl /	participle / adverbial participle (lttghbxfcnbt) / passive participle
dee / psv
if / pf // dt / id	imperfective / perfective // determinate (imperfective) /
	indeterminate
1sg / 1pl / 2sg / 2pl / 3sg /	first-person singular / first-person plural / second-person singular /
3pl	second-person plural / third-person singular / third-person plural
dim	diminutive
intg	interrogative
/ B / ↔ /	address by ns / address by ds / mutual address by ns / mutual
B ↔B / ↔B	address by ds / asymmetric address, one speaker using ns, the
	other ds /
У / И / О / Ф	diminutive name / first name / patronymic / surname
s jyf v dpzkf o vtyz d yf	word order: subject verb object domain manner
,fpfh m ,kfujgjkexyj

6A Reference Grammar of Russian

RG 1980). The four-volume “functional grammar” is superb (Bondarko 1991--96). Good grammars exist in other European languages (for example, Garde 1980 in French, Isaˇcenko 1975 in German). The discussion below, though it is informed by this tradition of grammatical analysis, does not cite them in the interests of avoiding a clutter of references.

1.2.4 Statistics and corpora

To characterize how likely some construction is, it is often useful to cite statistics of usage. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge the limitations on statistical statements. The likelihood of using some or another morphological form or syntactic construction is really the likelihood of using the context in which the form or construction is appropriate; statistics ultimately measure how likely people are to say a whole context. For example, if we find that the combination e ytq is less frequent than e ytt, what we have really found is that the contexts in which e ytq is appropriate occur less frequently than those in which e ytt is appropriate. Any statistical statement, even one that appears to deal with morphological variants, is a measure of the frequency of the contexts in which these variants are appropriate. When the discussion below cites statistical observations, it is usually to say, informally and without pretense of scientific rigor, that a certain construction occurs surprisingly often or not particularly often, relative to what one might expect. The limitations on what statistical statements mean should always be kept in mind.

As a corpus for making statistical observations, I initially used the “Uppsala Corpus.” The corpus, assembled by the Slavic Institute of Uppsala University and mounted on the web by the University of Tubingen,¨6 offers a balanced selection of styles of texts through the 1980s; it has its own search. As time went on, I made use of the broader resources of the web. The address “http://www.lib.ru/” has a vastly larger number of (belletristic) texts. By using a powerful search engine (such as Google, Zndex, or Rambler), it is possible to search this site or the whole web for words or phrases, and produce quantities of Russian larger by orders of magnitude than the Uppsala Corpus. For example, in the Uppsala Corpus, the target ins sg nsczxtq produced no tokens, the target e ytq five tokens. In contrast, a search of http://www.lib.ru/ (with Google, <20.X.02>) produced 233 hits for nsczxtq and 796 for e ytq; and on the whole web (with Google, <20.X.02>), there were 8,790 hits for nsczxtq and 25,900 for e ytq. The new electronic resources, then, offer the possibility of vast quantities of Russian, most of it very contemporary.

6At: http://www.sfb441.uni-tuebingen.de/b1/korpora.html. The description (<http://www.slaviska.uu. se/korpdesc.htm>) states that the corpus is based on 600 Russian texts, one million running words, of informative (late 1980s) and literary texts (1960--88).

Russian 7

There are, however, some negatives, which grow in proportion to the size of the corpus and the frequency of the target word or phrase. Unlike the Uppsala Corpus, which was designed to serve as a corpus and has a balanced selection of genres of texts, the web was not designed to serve as a corpus for linguistic investigation. The web has properties 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, sites from outside Russia, and informal personal writing and commercial writing that is no longer subjected to the same editing as was Russian printed in the Soviet era; (c) the fact that many of the texts show up on more than one site, undercutting the value of statistical observations; (d) instability -- the sites are not stable over time, impeding replication and verifiability; (e) the number of positive hits, which can be so large that the finite amount of time it takes to evaluate any token makes it difficult to examine all the data. The enormous volume of Russian available now is a mixed blessing.7

Allow me to cite cautionary tales. With respect to repetition: the phrase e;t jnrhsdfk<pst.if> jryj ‘[he] already opened the window’ -- a familiar phrase in aspectology -- gave a modest forty hits on the whole web (<20.XII.01>). But every one of them was the same sentence from a text by A. Tolstoy. With respect to stability, I searched the web for the expressions hfymit ytuj ‘earlier than him’ and d jnyjitybb ytuj ‘in relation to it’, and came up with 1,590 and 5,490 tokens, respectively (<20.XII.01>). The same search nine months later (<15.IX.02>) yielded 2,080 and 7,190 tokens -- an increase of 17 percent. With respect to quantity: I searched the web (<20.X.02>) for tokens of nsczxtq -- 8,790 hits -- and nsczxm/ -- 10,800 hits -- with the goal of finding out in crude terms the relative frequency of these two forms of the instrumental case of nsczxf. It would take perhaps eighty hours to evaluate all that data, if a modest fifteen seconds were devoted to each token. In short, the investigator has no control over the web and no way of determining what its properties as a corpus really are. The Uppsala Corpus, though smaller, offers a more balanced corpus.

In light of such difficulties, it is important to emphasize the limitations on citations from the web. All statistical statements made on the basis of the web should be taken for what they are: informal characterizations of frequency over unstable, often repetitive, collections of Russian assembled for other (commercial, etc.) purposes than to serve as a corpus for linguistic investigation. The corpus is not stable and one cannot control for repetition.

7 Browne 2001 explores the problems of using the web as a corpus.