In Defense of the Russian Infinitive

Abstract

The overwhelming majority of Russian verbs are regular and represent productive verb types that are signalled by the shape of the infinitive. At the same time, the infinitive by itself is often an inadequate guide to conjugation affiliation. In such cases, one or more forms of the non-past tense have traditionally been provided to resolve the difficulty; often it is the form of the third person plural.' More recently, a single-stem system of analyzing and presenting the Russian verb based upon Jakobson's well-known 1948 article has been promoted by a number of authors. The system's vaunted strength on the practical level is that students have to memorize only one form-the basic stem-for each verb in Russian, from which all other forms of the verb are derived. In the judgment of its proponents, the single-stem stem relieves our students once and for all of the burden of having to deal either with a captious infinitive or with a multi-stem display. Thus far, it appears that no contrastive performance studies have been conducted that would assist instructors in making a more considered choice between the single-stem and traditional approaches. In an effort to provide additional perspective on the issue, the present writer examined the 1000 most frequently used Russian verbs as determined by standard frequency counts in order to determine how unreliable the Russian infinitive really is. For the study, all verbs in -aTb/-RTb were assumed to conjugate