George Shevelov’s study The Simple Sentence and it’s intricate story

Abstract

In 1941, George Y. Shevelov prepared a chapter on the syntax of clauses in the Ukrainian language for a textbook published, however, ten years later. During World War II, Shevelov fled westward, and in the late 1940s, his intent to print the paper on the clause syntax in German translation failed. Shevelov’s book Narys suchasnoї ukraїnsʹkoї literaturnoї movy, which appeared in Munich in 1951, contained a section on syntax based on his study of clause structure. The same year the volume Kurs suchasnoї ukraїnsʹkoї literaturnoї movy. Syntaksys edited by Bulakhovsʹkyi came out in Kyiv. It starts with Shevelov’s chapter on the clause, though without the author’s name. Hence in Ukraine, it was widely believed that the section on the Ukrainian clause structure belonged to Leonid Bulakhovsʹkyi. Having moved to the USA in 1952, Shevelov got an opportunity to have his syntax published by the Mouton & Co publishing house in English translation. However, rumors about the similar text issued earlier in Kyiv disturbed the publisher, and the printing of the Ukrainian clause syntax textbook was postponed again. The Syntax of Modern Literary Ukrainian. The Simple Sentence was finally released in 1963. This paper elucidates several episodes of the intricate story of Shevelov’s Simple Sentence via the first-hand citations of Shevelov’s correspondence obtained from Schooneveld’s, Borshchak’s, and Shevelov’s archives. An analysis of numerous reviews of all three editions sheds light on how the experts in the USSR, in the Ukrainian émigré circles, and in the American Slavic realm assessed Shevelov’s text. Resting upon the Russian and European grammar tradition, Shevelov’s syntax seemed vague to the American Slavicists. Nevertheless, startling is the author’s synthesis of the structural and logical approaches. Its final version provides valuable remarks of the author on the syntactic phenomena viewed through the developmental trend of the language system. Unfortunately, the book remains unknown to Ukrainian linguists. Keywords: syntax of the Ukrainian language, clause syntax, grammar tradition, structural approach