Russian Syntax Research Articles

IMPRINT OF S. PRZYBYSZEWSKI’S PROSE ON M. BULGAKOV’S LAST NOVEL

Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s and Mikhail Bulgakov’s prose has similar features due to common sources, as well as the influence of the Polish decadency on this great Russian novel, namely, its themes, characters, vocabulary, syntax and intonation pattern. This similarity is not absolute but it can be traced in quotes and allusions. Certainly, the demonology of these two authors has a lot in common (not including Loci communes of the Common Slavic folklore). Furthermore, millennial heretic traditions kindled people’s interest in the first third of the 20 th century. As a result, authors favoured such anthologies as «Satanism» which had been written by F. Sologub, V. Bryusov, Th. Mann, A. France and S. Przybyszewski. Therefore, Bulgakov’s idea to create the «novel about the Devil» was not new, however its religious and philosophical essence, aesthetic and moral focus, artistic representation were unmatched. The Master and Margarita’s love story is described in accordance with the «fin de siecle la belle epoque» traditions and referred to S. Przybyszewski’s most significant works. The novels of the Polish and Russian authors are focused upon creative process which is a way of life, premonition, new opportunity and the representation of love. As it is often shown in the decadent literature, an unrecognised genius can find solace only in the embrace of a loving woman. S. Przybyszewski and his friend, sculptor G. Vigeland, associated this female figure with death that reminds the sweetest of dreams. M. Bulgakov followed their suit in his creative works. First the Polish author and then the Russian writer created the image of a white road which leads to a strange paradise where European medieval bridges are surrounded by tropical flowers and palms. The loving couple gets there riding winged horses. The «Prince of Darkness» send them to «the kingdom of eternal spring where love makes its magic and fills the Master’s soul with a creative power; to the kingdom of golden sand which covers feet and erases all memories». While on earth the Polish author and his beloved«who protects his soul from any danger and represents his sole inspiration» choose Tom to be their successor. This artist revives beauty and suffers in the moonlit nights when «it seems that a shadowy and mysterious park hosts a solemn mass and the whole world is sacrificed to it as a being of flesh and blood».

Andreeva, E. and Belobrovtseva, I. (eds). ‘Tolko Vy poimete sleduiushchii tekst. Perepiska N. E. Andreeva i L. F. Zurova (review)

REVIEWS 533 this is a tremendously useful book, and one that expertly demonstrates how Nabokov’s texts have still so much to disclose to the curious and attentive reader. UCL SSEES Barbara Wyllie Andreeva, E. and Belobrovtseva, I. (eds). ‘Tol´ko Vy poimete sleduiushchii tekst...’. Perepiska N. E. Andreeva i L. F. Zurova. Baltiiskii arkhiv: Russkaia kul´tura v Pribaltike, 13. Tallinna Ülikooli Slaavi Keelte ja Kutluuride Instituut, Tallin, 2013. 298 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. $42.00 (paperback). It is a fact, noted by Nikolai Andreyev in his work on Diak Viskovatii and the cultural heritage of Pskov and Novgorod, explored with great poignancy by Iurii Lotman in the context of the semiosphere, that peripheral cultural outposts frequently foreground the central culture from which they stem: Venice, St Petersburg, Byzantium. When the political geography changes, there is always a danger that this subtle apotheosis of the non-native, nonhomegrown heritage may be lost. It is, therefore, particularly important that Tallin, capital of present-day Estonia, has given us such an excellent ‘Russian’ seriesasBaltiiskiiarkhiv,editedbyAlexanderDanilevskiy,andthispublication is one more very cogent reason to be grateful for it. The correspondence between Nikolai Andreyev and Leonid Zurov, springing as it does from a shared interest in the archeology of the Pechorskii Krai, is of more than provincial interest. Andreyev’s research during the prewar expeditions on which the two cooperated was funded by the Kondakov Institute in Prague, Zurov’s by the Musée d’Homme in Paris. The detail of their archeological and ethnographical discoveries is fascinating: both men not only met with predictable difficulties from local bureaucracy and border authorities but also from monastics in residence in the ancient monasteries they were investigating and, in Zurov’s case, restoring. The monks liked things as they had been yesterday, not as they were four to six hundred years previously, and regarded the two young lay scholars as, at best, heretically inclined ignorami, at worst — godless ‘Free Masons’. The ethnically Russian peasant population, however, had, as Zurov noted, much longer memories and were sometimes of great help in determining the academically disputed exact position of Ivan the Terrible’s heavy artillery, where the Russians had baked their bread and the Novgorodians buried their dead, or what precisely occurred when Abbot Kornilii surrendered his fortress monastery to the Muscovites — events which lived on in the folk-memory with extraordinary immediacy (p. 94). SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 534 The fact that Zurov was also, and indeed primarily, a creative writer and Andreyev a percipient literary critic (usually under a pseudonym) adds further interest to their correspondence, which was renewed with great mutual sympathy after a period during and immediately after the Second World War when they lost touch. Zurov’s very Russian Russian syntax and rich vocabulary, full of local words and echoes from the pre-Petrine past, is not at all in the tradition of Bunin, to whom and to whose family he was known to be bound by close personal ties. Critics tended to dismiss him as an epigone ‘of the Bunin school’ and he was appreciative of the fact that Andreyev never regarded him as such but perceived his individuality as a writer, took a supportive interest in his plans for new publications and wrote and lectured, with insight and enthusiasm, about his colourful and highly original prose. Zurov, in his turn, responded eagerly to his friend’s scholarly work and took a lively, vicarious interest in his happy marriage to an English woman (‘Dzhill — umna, sil´na, glaza iasnye. Vse vidit i vse ponimaet’, p. 71) his children and reunion, after years of separation, with his mother, repatriated after the war to Soviet Estonia, whom Zurov remembered fondly from Izborsk, Pechory: ‘Kak legko, svobodno tantsevala... kakoy rost´, kakaya stat´, Gera!’ (p. 79). Both men took a lively interest in creative and critical literature in the Soviet Union and in what was going on in their own field of study in the world of scholarship. They were also actively involved in émigré literary events and publishing. Andreyev, firmly tied down by academic and family responsibilities in Cambridge and Cornwall, where the family spent their holidays, was always hungry for news which...

The syntax of argument structure by Leonard H. Babby (review)

Reviewed by: The syntax of argument structure by Leonard H. Babby Peter Arkadiev Leonard H. Babby. The syntax of argument structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. xviii + 307. [Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, 120.] In the book under review, Leonard Babby,1 an eminent linguist renowned for his influential work on many aspects of the syntax of Russian, presents an ingenious and sophisticated theory of morphosyntax stemming from his previous studies and in many important ways diverging from the current mainstream of generative grammar. While for most proponents of Government and Binding and Minimalist Program “argument structure” is either read off the semantic representation of predicates (as in, e.g., Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995as in, e.g., Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1998) or reduced to syntactic configurations (e.g., Borer 2005, Ramchand 2008), Babby argues for a view that argument structure is an autonomous module of grammar, and in fact the core one, from which syntactic representations are built, and which cannot be fully reduced to semantics. For Babby, argument structure is not just a static representation, but a dynamic component of language where various operations such as passivization, causativization, etc., apply, and which is crucial for the determination of the initial syntactic representation of clauses. Despite its explicit theory-constructing goals, the book is thoroughly empirically-oriented, presenting a number of in-depth case studies of Russian morphosyntax, such as the structure and syntax of “short” (SF) and “long” (LF) forms of adjectives, control of infinitives, participles and gerunds, and the predicate instrumental construction, each elucidating particular aspects of the theory. A reader, accustomed to associating the term “argument structure” with such issues as “unaccusativity,” “dative shift,” or “spray/load alternations,” might be surprised by Babby’s choice of subject matter. However, the book shows, and quite convincingly, [End Page 259] that the phenomena Babby investigates can be elegantly and revealingly accounted for from the chosen perspective. The book consists of an introduction, five chapters, endnotes, references and indices. In the introduction (pp. 1–10) Babby provides the reader with a very useful nutshell presentation of the main theoretical claims of the book and locates his conception of argument structure against the background of current generative theorizing. Importantly, Babby acknowledges from the outset that his theoretical thinking has been largely motivated by his empirical work on Russian, whose morphosyntax, being different from English in many important respects, cannot necessarily be adequately accounted for by “Anglocentric” approaches reducing all grammatical complexity to basic syntactic operations such as Merge and Move. In chapter 1 “The structure of argument structure” (pp. 11–73) Babby presents the conceptual and technical basics of his theory of argument structure and syntactic projection. The theory rests on the notion of diathesis consisting of two “autonomous but related tiers” (p. 13) of theta selection and category selection, in part going back to the corresponding notion developed in the Leningrad school of typology (Xolodovič 1974). Two assumptions about diathesis underlying the whole theory are the following: (i) all predicates and productive predicate affixes in all languages have the same universal diathesis structure (see below); (ii) syntactic operations such as movement cannot alter the predicate’s diathesis and, consequently, the basic grammatical relations in the clause. From (ii) it follows that many argument-structure-related operations often assumed to be syntactic, e.g., passivization or subject suppression with infinitives, occur at the level of argument structure and not in syntax proper. Therefore, argument structure is a dynamic morphosyntactic component of grammar where the lexically determined diathesis of the verbal stem is successively combined (“amalgamated”) with the diatheses of whatever productive affixes2 the verb attaches, and this interaction between the diatheses of the predicate stem and affixes determines the potential syntactic configurations in which the predicate occurs. Technically, the diathesis is a 2 × 4 grid where the upper tier represents up to three thematic roles and the lower tier, in turn, the syntactic categories corresponding to them; see (1) below for a tabular notation [End Page 260] and (2) for the corresponding linear notation of the diathesis of a three-argument ditransitive predicate. The order of theta positions in the upper tier and their mapping to phrase structure...

The syntax of Russian by John Frederick Bailyn (review)

Reviewed by: The syntax of Russian by John Frederick Bailyn Egor Tsedryk John Frederick Bailyn. The syntax of Russian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xvii + 373 pp. Rich case morphology and word order flexibility are two interrelated properties of Russian that have long intrigued syntacticians from various schools and traditions. In The syntax of Russian, Bailyn dismisses anything that could potentially be qualified as “optional” or “non-configurational” in Russian. In a nutshell, he claims that: (i) Russian has the same major constituents as English, including verb phrase (VP) and determiner phrase (DP); (ii) case marking is a by-product of syntactic configurations, and it is attributed to a limited number of categories; (iii) basic word order is Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), while other patterns are derived by movement; (iv) discourse-related movement occurs at the level of Functional Form,1 which is “a point of interface between linguistic and non-linguistic [discursive] systems” (320). As Bailyn notes in the preface, his general goal is to describe the main structural properties of modern Russian. Thus, he targets a large readership, including anyone interested in Russian or in syntax more generally. At the same time he has a narrower goal of highlighting those aspects of Russian that represent a particular interest in current syntactic theory. In my opinion, this book is more successful in achieving its narrower goal. A reader who does not have a back-ground in minimalism, or more generally in generative syntax, may find it difficult to follow, especially parts two and three. The book contains seven chapters organized into three parts. The first part (Basic configurations, chapters 1–3) follows the logic of an introductory textbook in syntax: it outlines the internal structure of phrases, describes constituency tests applicable to Russian, and presents the minimal structure of main and subordinate clauses. The second two parts (Case, chapters 4–5, and Word order, chapters 6–7) reveal the syntactic nature of core cases (Nominative, Accusative, Dative, [End Page 341] Genitive, and Instrumental) and uncover movement processes deriving various word order patterns in Russian. In the remainder of this review I will first go through each chapter, highlighting the key ideas, claims, and assumptions. Then I will provide my comments, focusing on specific issues that caught my attention, and I will finish with a general assessment of the book. 1. Chapter Summary Chapter 1 (Verb phrases, 3–33) presents Bailyn’s assumptions about phrase structure, focusing on selectional properties of verbs and their extended projections. Bailyn follows Adger (2003) in assuming that the basic syntactic operation Merge is triggered by the necessity to eliminate an uninterpretable categorial feature. This chapter also presents classical constituency tests, such as coordination, fronting, and ellipsis, which motivate the existence of VP. Binding tests further support a constituent structure, in which the subject asymmetrically c-commands the object. In addition, Bailyn illustrates the difference between arguments and adjuncts and at the end of the chapter provides the minimal sentence structure for Russian. Chapter 2 (Nominal phrases, 34–72) extends the idea of a hierarchical structure to the nominal domain. Special attention is paid to adnominal complements expressing possession, identification, and event participants, such as Agent and Theme. As expected, nominalizations, featuring a variety of adnominal Genitives and Obliques, constitute the bulk of the discussion on argument structure. Another important theme of this chapter is the DP-hypothesis. Even though Russian is an article-less language, Bailyn supports this hypothesis by analyzing a variety of prenominal elements such as demonstratives, possessives, numerals, and quantifiers. He also discusses the data that could potentially refute it (e.g., left-branch extraction, following Bošković 2005), and suggests an account in terms of an enriched functional structure of Russian DPs (65). Finally, Bailyn presents his analysis of adjectival modification, focusing on long and short form adjectives. Chapter 3 (Types of clauses, 73–119) closes the first part of the book, offering a detailed overview of Russian clauses. It is subdivided into five parts: (i) independent declarative, interrogative, and imperative clauses; (ii) subordinate indicative and subjunctive clauses, (iii) wh-structures, (iv) small clauses, infinitives, and gerunds, and (v) impersonals. [End Page 342] Bailyn starts with a presentation of the...

From the Editor

From the Editor Steven Franks, Editor-in-Chief This issue comes so quickly on the heels of 19.1 that there is virtually nothing newsworthy to report. In fact, the Journal's most significant accomplishment in the past two months is succeeding in publishing both 2011 numbers in time for the annual SLS meeting, which this year takes place 1-3 September 2011 at the Université de Provence in Aix-en-Provence. Next year's meeting is already determined and a call appears at the back of this issue. SLS 2012 will be at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, 25-27 August. Invited speakers are Brian Joseph, Catherine Rudin, and Alan Timberlake. The present issue offers a typical assortment of material. Sadly, once again we report on the passing of a young and highly productive linguist, Maria Babyonyshev. Reading this In Memoriam piece, I was struck by the range and depth of her contributions to the study of Russian syntax. The three articles printed in these pages offer new insights into thorny problems, and the two reviews examine important recent books in the field. Keith Langston's review of Snježana Kordi's controversial book Jezik i nacionalizam is particularly noteworthy, both because of the difficulty of offering a fair review of a book that takes a hardnosed stand on such a contentious and subjective issue as whether Croatian and Serbian should be called distinct languages and because in JSL 18.2 we published a paper by John Bailyn which reported his research demonstrating how similar Serbian and Croatian really are. In my column in the last issue I catalogued a retinue of changes in JSL staffing and a number of on-going SLS issues. Since these are just as fresh now as they were then, I do not repeat them here. [End Page 1] Copyright © 2011 Steven Franks

What languages must convey: the construction-based syntax of Old Russian

This article considers the principal difference between a construction-based and a valency-based syntax, and argues that constructions, like morphological distinctions, are organized in paradigms. It is generally assumed that verb–argument relations were relatively loose in Old Russian. Unlike in Modern Russian, which has a fully developed valency system where the verb determines the number of arguments and their (case) forms, many Old Russian verbs combined with more than one case form or even allowed for distinctly different syntactic constructions. Examples of A2 (argument 2) variation in Old Russian are considered, and it is argued that the syntactic system of Old Russian can be interpreted as construction-based rather than valency-based. It is shown that the concept of construction is a prerequisite for making sense of the case forms filling the argument slots in Old Russian, and tentative examples of construction paradigms are presented.

Russian syntax and semantics

Основная идея предлагаемого подхода заключается в том, что необходимо строго различать между аксиоматическим фундаментом теории, между допускаемой теорией творческой свободой, и между наблюдениями, которые имеют отношение к выбору среди допустимых в ее рамках альтернатив. Утверждения, которые логически вытекают из аксиоматического фундамента, в рамках теории имеют статус божественной истины, в то время как утверждения, которые основаны на свободе выбора исследователя, имеют статус ловкости рук (ср. Joos 1957, 80). Одно объяснение (ловкость рук) может быть проще или экономичнее другого, но подобный выбор невозможен в случае свойств, которые логически вытекают из аксиоматического фундамента. Основной постулат теории Эбелинга (Ebeling 1978, 1984, 2006) таков: семантические отображения состоят из проекций (набора) различимых признаков, принадлежащих различимым объектам в реальном мире, и из их взаимоотношений. Чтобы свести семантическую систему Эбелинга к порождающей системе синтаксических правил, нужен набор формальных правил, отличающийся от порождающей грамматики обычного типа. Для того, чтобы создать доступное описание русского синтаксиса, я упростил систему Эбелинга, заменив значимые элементы формальными символами и отношениями, исходя из простоты, экономии и системной конгруэнтности, и ввел три операции, при которых семантические различия теряются на синтаксическом уровне, равно как фонемные различия – на морфонологическом уровне.

Лингвокультурологические аспекты русского синтаксиса XX века и феномен словообразовательной игры современных СМИ России

The monographs of J. A. Pokrovskaya “Russian Syntax in the 20th Century: Linguaculturological Analysis” (2001) and S. V. Ilyasova “Derivational Game as a Phenomenon of the Modern Mass-media” (2002) were published at Rostov University. In the first book are given linguaculturological periods of the Russian syntax in the 20th century; in the second one are considered the different aspects of the derivational game in the Russian mass-media.

The Role of Case in Russian Syntax

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1983.

Predicate Nominals: A Partial Surface Syntax of Russian. By Johanna Nichols. University of California Publications in Linguistics, vol. 97. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1981. xix, 397 pp. $24.50, paper.

Predicate Nominals: A Partial Surface Syntax of Russian. By Johanna Nichols. University of California Publications in Linguistics, vol. 97. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1981. xix, 397 pp. $24.50, paper. - Volume 44 Issue 3

Predicate nominals: A Partial Surface Syntax of Russian

Predicate nominals: A Partial Surface Syntax of Russian

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

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.

Elementary Russian Syntax

Elementary Russian Syntax

Semantic Differentiation among Negative Sentence Variants

In keeping with the general concern in contemporary linguistics with the relationship among units at a given linguistic level, recent work in Russian syntax has shown an increased interest in the relationship among sentence variants within the so-called syntactic paradigm, particularly in the semantic differentiation among the variants. This heightened concern among linguists finds support in the needs of foreign-language pedagogy, because fluency in a foreign language implies control of a range of sentence structures and an understanding of their semantic differentials. If the semantic study of sentence variants has lagged behind the study of their formal structure, it is because descriptions as a rule are stated in terms of generalized category symbols, individual lexical meanings not being treated. Both linguists and pedagogues often limit their consideration of sentence variants to an enumeration of structures which are close in meaning-transforms of a single kernel sentence, variants of a single invariant model, ways of expressing one and the same meaning, and so on. To be sure, semantic differences are not entirely ignored, but they tend to be stated in terms of quite general semantic categories, e.g., presence or absence of an agent, agentive or instrumental meaning of the grammatical subject, and so on.' Such generalized formulations, although appropriate in the works where they are used, fail to give a complete and realistic picture of the functioning of these constructions in the linguistic system. Further study of the semantic nuances which correspond to structural differences is needed.

Russian Syntax; Aspects of Modern Russian Syntax and Vocabulary

Russian Syntax; Aspects of Modern Russian Syntax and Vocabulary

Russian Syntax: Aspects of Modern Russian Syntax and Vocabulary

Russian Syntax: Aspects of Modern Russian Syntax and Vocabulary

Russian Syntax: Aspects of Modern Russian Syntax and Vocabulary

Russian Syntax: Aspects of Modern Russian Syntax and Vocabulary

Russian Syntax: Aspects of Modern Russian Syntax and Vocabulary.

Russian Syntax: Aspects of Modern Russian Syntax and Vocabulary.

Russian Syntax: Aspects of Modern Russian Syntax and Vocabulary

Russian Syntax: Aspects of Modern Russian Syntax and Vocabulary