On the Syntax of Be-Sentences in Russian: A Review Article

Abstract

these constructions. The topic has also led the author into a wide-ranging exploration of Russian syntax and of grammatical theory in its application to Russian. The results are fortunate indeed. The book is uniquely suited for use in introductory courses on the structure of Russian or for scholars who wish to familiarize themselves with transformationalist methodology. In addition, anyone already working on Russian syntax will find the book useful not only because of its analysis of BE-sentences, but also as a general reference to recent work. The book thus offers rather more than its modest title suggests. The work contains five chapters, the first introducing the aims, methodology, and theoretical foundation of the research, and the last serving as an epilogue. Chapter Two treats the question of whether byt' should be analyzed in the same manner in all sentences or whether there exist both an existential verb and a copular form. Chvany summarizes earlier discussion of this well-worn topic, concluding that there are two kinds of byt' which are not in complementary distribution (and which are therefore not contextually conditioned variants) and which can be defined according to certain criteria (summarized in a table on page 53). Both kinds of BE-sentences occur with and without est '. However, its appearance in existential sentences is impossible if the existence of the subject is presupposed, whereas in copular sentences the existence of the subject is always presupposed, and its appearance is therefore obviously not correlated with presupposition. Instead, est' is introduced to carry mild stress on truth value (lingvistika est'nauka), to carry sentence stress, and to emphasize present tense (160). Chvany proposes deep structures for sentences containing each kind of byt' and also presents a taxonomy of sentences containing copular byt ' She discusses treatment of tense as a feature of the verb, and comments on some hitherto unnoticed facts about the future forms in bud-. Chapter Three deals with sentences containing byt' and prepositional phrases with u, for example: U Borisa est' kniga. U nego net samovara. Chvany concludes that the locational sense of prepositional phrases with u is distinct from the possessive one, and she proposes derivations corresponding to each meaning. She claims that the predominance of the possessive over the locational meaning corresponds to the possessive's simpler deep structure, whereas the locational u involves an additional level of embedding. She also shows parallels with the transitive/intransitive pair irnet '/imet 'sja. Chapter Four is more abstract than the earlier chapters, offering a transformational account of the data, with a set of ordered rules to derive sentences from the deep structures proposed in Chapter Two.