8A Reference Grammar of Russian

In the same vein, it is also important to register the disclaimer that there is no guarantee that specific websites, referred to occasionally below, will remain valid.

1.2.5 Strategies of describing Russian grammar

The discussion of Russian below follows an unsurprising sequence: after these preliminaries, ending with the writing of Russian, the discussion goes from sound to morphology (grammar in the traditional sense) to syntax -- first arguments, then predicates, then predicates in context (tense, aspect, modality) -- and finally, selected discourse operations that apply to the presentation of information. Obviously there are many topics that belong in two places -- tense in participles is a question of morphology and of predicate semantics in context; the second genitive is a question of morphology, of arguments, and of predicates (since the use of the second genitive depends on the syntactic context) -- and it was necessary to make decisions about where to put discussion. Cross-references are provided.

A word about the philosophy of grammar invoked here. Modern linguistics has prided itself on identifying basic, primitive elements (phonemes, morphemes, constituents of sentences) and their rules of combination. For some researchers, the ultimate goal is to characterize which sentences are possible, which impossible, and to state the rules of combination. My experience in assembling this grammar has led in a different direction. Repeatedly I found that what was significant was the construction -- the pattern, the configuration, the template (nhfafhtn8). Patterns include all manner of linguistic knowledge: constituent elements; typical lexical items that participate; strategies of interpreting the meaning, or value, of the pattern in discourse; stylistic value -- in short, patterns include all kinds of linguistic knowledge. The semantic, pragmatic, and stylistic values of a construction are not entirely predictable from its primitive elements and rules of combination, and though any construction certainly contains smaller entities, it is not always possible (or important) to identify the primitive elements. It becomes more important to say in what contexts, and with what meaning, a construction can be used. The whole is often greater than its parts. For example, the free (dative) infinitive construction (yfv<dat> yt vbyjdfnm<inf> ub,tkb ‘it is not for us to avoid disaster’, ,tp htdjk/wbb yfv<dat> yt lj,bnmcz<inf> cjdthitycndf ‘without a revolution it is not for us to achieve perfection’) has recognizable parts: an infinitive, a dative that would be the subject if the infinitive were a finite verb, and the other argument phrases governed by the verb. There is no overt finite verb; no form of ,ßnm ‘be’ is used in the

8 Zhivov and Timberlake 1997.

Russian 9

present tense. The meaning of this construction -- it makes a prediction about the possibility of an imagined event -- cannot be computed just from its constituent parts, the dative and the infinitive. Moreover, the construction has different variants, each of which has a specific stylistic value. The variant just illustrated is folksy, apodictic. Another variant of the construction used in content questions is neutral and productive, as in, Rfr gjgfcnm d yfxfkj cgbcrf yfqltyys[ cfqnjd yf gjbcrjds[ vfibyf[? ‘How [is it possible] to get to the beginning of the list of sites in search engines?’ Indeed, the initial portion of this question, Rfr gjgfcnm . . . ‘how [is it possible] to reach . . .’, produced 18,900 hits on the whole web (<20.X.02>). In general, then, the presentation of Russian grammar below emphasizes whole combinations and their value (including stylistic), downplaying the task of identifying primitive elements or articulating notations for encoding rules of combination.

When there are two closely related constructions that differ by one linguistic form -- for example, relatives made with rnj´ vs. rjnj´hsq, genitive vs. accusative with negated verbs, etc. -- it is an interesting question how speakers choose between the variants. In a notational approach to grammar, one can always create different structures that will produce different cases (for example). But because the structures will be distinct, there is no way of comparing the properties that distinguish them -- the properties of the noun phrases, the discourse import -- and such an 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 and makes a choice that is binary -- to use one construction or another. In the following, I assume that speakers operate with templates (constructions) that have multiple properties -- lexical to syntactic to discourse. In any instance, speakers ask which template a given utterance better matches. This is a holistic decision: in the genitive of negation, perhaps, speakers evaluate a context as being concerned with absence of a situation (genitive) as opposed to reporting an entity’s properties (accusative). To get to this holistic judgment, speakers ask which template better fits the context. And to answer that question, speakers probably have to select one feature to pay attention to, while others are ignored. In practical terms, this means it is difficult, for many constructions, to give watertight rules about 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 influence choices.