Variativnoe bespredlozhnoe glagol'noe upravlenie v russkom iazyke XVIII veka by Liudmila Ferm (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS !35 Ferm, Liudmila. Variativnoe bespredlozhnoe glagol'noe upravleniev russkomiazyke XVIII veka. S?dert?rn Academic Studies, 26. S?dert?rns h?gskola, Huddinge, 2005. 371 pp. Notes. Tables. Bibliography. Index. Price unknown. No teacher of Russian who has tried to teach students when to use the accusative or the genitive after HCKaTb or to explain why Gohtbc? is occasion ally heard governing an accusative can fail to be interestedby thisbook. They will learn from it that vacillations in the government of certain verbs go back as far as Old Russian and that theirpresent behaviour can often be explained historically. Dr Ludmila Ferm has rightly based her investigations into non prepositional verbal government inRussian on the language of the eighteenth century, a timewhen all its linguistic levelswere influx.However, likeB. O. Unbegaun in his La Langue russeauXVIe si?cle(1300-1550) L La Flexion des noms (Paris, 1935), she has included material both before and after the period central to her research, so justifying her claim that her work is both synchronie (in relation to the eighteenth century) and also diachronic (p. 11). Since her book focuses on changes innon-prepositional verbal government, she excludes both those non-prepositional verbal-nominal word-combinations inwhich variation is not observed and those inwhich prepositions are used to support meanings given by case endings alone. The ninety verbs which her study covers include many of the most frequently occurring lexemes (p. 11). Her work is corpus-based in the sense that it is confined to specific eighteenth-century sources. In view of the fact that innovations are more likely to appear in spontaneous, unpremeditated language, her corpus is formed by letters,memoirs, diaries and reports: all artistic literature is excluded. It amounts to a total of about 17,400 pages (p. 29). She presents her data, where possible, in the form of tables inwhich the century isdivided into three roughly equal time-spans, and the numbers of examples found in each time-span are inserted into the appropriate boxes in the tables. It is the fact that all the examples found in the corpus have been counted in that gives these tables their statistical validity. Professor Unbegaun was working before the linguisticmodels proposed in textbooks of general linguistics began to be applied as templates for the analysis of individual languages. Dr Ferm's work falls in the post-linguistic modelling epoch, when the limitations of linguisticmodelling have already become apparent. Consequently she allows no a priori theorizing to obtrude between her texts and her commentaries on them (pp. 25-26). The core of her book, therefore, consists of the mass of examples themselves, quoted with full contexts in their original orthography and with the verbal-nominal word combinations in question highlighted by italics.The examples are presented in four substantial chapters: verbs whose complements vary between the accusative and the genitive; those whose complements vary between the dative and the accusative; those whose complements vary between the instrumental and either the accusative, the dative, or the genitive; and those whose comple ments vary between the genitive and thedative.Within each chapter theverbs are grouped semantically. When discussing the cases to be used after HCKaTb most grammars of Russian concentrate on the nature of their complements, whether they are 136 SEER, 86, I, 2008 animate or inanimate, abstract or concrete. Dr Ferm accepts that these factors are involved, but she goes on to show that the chief factor driving changes in verbal government is not the nature of the complements but changes in the semantics of the verbs which govern them. Thus, when Ha?eflTbCfl ceased to govern a genitive and took instead the preposition Ha plus an accusative, it was because HaAeflTbCfl had ceased to be associated with such verbs of expectation as 03KH.zja.Tband had become linked instead with verbs such as pacCHHTbiBaTb (pp. 23, 77-83), or again when npeAynpe^HTb switched from taking a complement in the dative to being followed by a direct object in the accusative, itwas because npeflynpcaHTb was no longer classed with such verbs as npenHTCTBOBaTb but with verbs such as npeflOTBpaTHTb (pp. 23, 223-25). In her Grammatika sovremennogo russkogoliteraturnogo iazyka (Moscow, 1970), N...