January 29, 2010
Saints Alive
Now nearly a week after the Saints’ thrilling overtime defeat of the Vikings, the passions of football — so volatile, so atavistic, so animal in us the fans — rise up from the unconscious. I am angry that the Saints’ defense is so pointedly focused on physically hurting the quarterback, as they did Favre. I dislike the man, but he kept popping up like a Punchinello even when his ankle was beaten and twisted to a pulp, I grudgingly give him his due. He lost by his own weakness, a love of the risky cross-body pass, which a sharp-eyed Saint defender picked up on and picked off. That kind of defense I admire; I deplore ‘kill the quarterback’.
On the other hand my dander gets up when I read in the NYTimes a litany of missed calls by officials in the game, most if not all in favor of the Saints, especially including the now infamous double hit on Favre, from above and from below, too far below. The article deceitfully implied, without saying so outright, that the officials gave us the game. Listen, you blockheads, the final score is the final score, and can you count the Vikings’ turnovers, you blockheads?
I am pleased to hear that the celebrating, drunken crowds in the Quarter on Sunday evening did not riot and vandalize property, as we would expect in any European city after European football. I am pleased, but not surprised. Isn’t this the way we are in New Orleans? After, we say, “we’re not Philadelphia or Chicago,” placing the madding crowd a lot closer to home. Now the Carmelite nuns in New Orleans became huge Saints fans this season, and they prayed — with gusto and almost ecclesiastical violence — for St. Joseph to help them. “When we won the toss in overtime, I knew we had it,” chortled Sister Miriam, who obviously has been watching the NFL every weekend (!). Then another sister, perhaps the Mother Superior, or whatever, explained, “we knew what it meant when the ball went through the goalposts and the referee raised his arms! We understood that, we knew!!” (applause and delight all around from the sisters). “And the warmth and kindness of the crowds, no violence — these are godlike qualities,” she added, projecting her vision of the world onto New Orleans. The identification of the city and the Saints, resurrection and redemption, death and rebirth — these are all eternal verities, I guess.
Oh, well, it’s all for the good. I still dislike football, aside from what the Saints are doing — football, a game where much of importance that we have just witnessed is reviewed, challenged and nullified, as though it never happened at all. Not so in baseball (except for the very recent admission of instant replay review of playoff homers, upon challenge, which I deplore).
Next week, let’s get Manning! On him, Saints! Knock him down!
gmc
Friday, January 29, 2010
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Morphophonemics and the Rule of Intensity Attraction
January 23, 2010
Morphophonemics and the Rule of Intensity Attraction
I am going to try explaining Jakobson’s famous article of 1948, which remains perhaps the single most influential study on the formal description of verbal morphology of all time, prefiguring Chomsky’s “Sound Pattern of English” and many others. Scholars have spent their lives working out the ramifications of Jakobson’s truly visionary 13-page sketch.
So in simple terms, or as simple as I can make them, for you who have learned a few, or maybe more than a few, Russian verbs and how they work.
First, morphophonemic transcriptions. This is the alphabet of the deep (abstract) base form of verbs. One abstract base form per verb. Choose as your basic form, Jakobson says, the one which may occur in the environment where the other one, too, may occur. What? Let me quote that precisely.
“We take as basic the alternate which appears in a position where the other alternate too would be permissible.” Take Russian я смотрЮ, pronounced smatr’—U and ты смОтришь, pronounced smOtr’—iš. (I write all stressed vowels as capitals). These are phonemic transcriptions, where we see that the vowel ‘o’ occurs under stress, while the vowel ‘a’ occurs outside of stress. Now, we choose the variant smOtr’— as basic because we could, conceivably, have a phonemic word smAtr’—, but we couldn’t have a phonemic smotr—U, because ‘o’ always reduces to ‘a’ outside of stress. That helps us pick the morphophonemic base: the one with ‘o’, even if ‘a’ occurs in most of the present tense forms.
A more complex example is the Russian word печь, ‘bake’, conjugated пекУ печёшь печёт печём печёте пекУт, past tense пёк пеклА пеклО пеклИ, infinitive печь. Now the phonemic transcription mirrors the softening of consonants and reduction of vowels: p’ik—U, p’ič—O-š, p’ič—Ot, p’ok—#, p’ik—l-A. Study these carefully. Soft ‘p’before the vowels. ‘e’ reduces to ‘i’ outside of stress. Past masculine has ‘o’, the other pasts ‘i’. What should be the basic form here? Here again we look for the stressed position. Now, ‘o’ is not admitted between two soft consonants, in normal standard Russian, so the infinitive is forced to печь , where both the p’ and č are soft (we don’t write č’to indicate softness, because č is always and everywhere soft). But both ‘o’ and ‘e’ can occur after a soft consonant and before a hard, as пёк ‘he baked’, and сек ‘he chopped’. So the basic morphophonemic form is p’ok—, unstressed. This, even though the vowel ‘o’ only actually occurs in the masculine past; that’s because it is forced out by the environment in all the others. We look at the phonemic shapes to see how the pronounciation will be, but we look to the morphophonemic shapes to see the underlying base.
So you are actually learning morphophonemics and phonemics when reading the first few pages of this article. Just another example or two. Take the verb лежАть ‘to be lying’, я лежУ ты лежИшь он лежИт они лежАт, лежAл, лежAла, gerund (with the meaning ‘lying, recumbent’ лёжа. Here are some phonemic shapes: l’iž—A-t’, l’iž—U, l’iž—I-š, l’Oža. Again the base form will be l’ož—a; ‘o’ is turns to ‘i’ unstressed after soft.
One more example: ‘to drink’, пить, пью пьёшь пьёт пьём пьёте пьют, пил, пилА, пили, imperative пей. In this verb we see an example of a situation that comes up frequently in the Russian verb: there seems to be one stem for the infinitive and past tense, and another for the present. Indeed, if we take the non-syllabic p’j— as the base (the present stem) we add the vocalic endings, and for the nonpresent forms, there has to be a vowel inserted, with which ‘j’ will alternate — ‘i’. Compare, for a very productive category, the present stems d’elaj—, pon’imaj— with the past stems dela—, pon’ima—. Here we see that a resonant (j), or potentially any consonant, will be truncated before another consonant — that is, any nonpresent ending. VC and CV are permitted across the boundary from stem to full form, but VV and CC are not.
In this way Jakobson turns the question “one stem or two” into a deeper observation about the behavior of morphophonemes when in contact with each other.
Wait a minute, how do we get the imperative пей? Why isn’t that the basic stem? Well, because the ‘e’ would have to be deleted in every other form, or changed to ‘i’. Better to assume that the imperative has an inserted ‘e’, since, of course, a word cannot be nonsyllabic in Russian verbs, so p’j— inserts the vowel but keeps the ‘j’ before zero. The ending of the imperative will be zero, as it is unless the ending is stressed.
If unstressed, the present tense endings begin with a high vowel, ‘u’ for 3rd person and ‘i’ for the others. This is called the rule of intensity attraction. The diffuse (high, or close) vowels i, u appear when the endings are unstressed, or of weaker intensity. Thus плАчут, плАчешь, плАчет, пИшешь пИшут, вИжу вИдишь, вИдют [this is older Moscow pronunciation for a present-day mid central vowel]. Note that e and и boil down to the same phoneme here, ‘i’, because if the e is unstressed (weak), it goes up to the diffuse, or weaker, high vowel, and the third pl ending я, if unstressed, in older Moscow norm went to у. (But not any more, which seems to vitiate the rule.)
More later. That wasn’t so bad, was it?
Morphophonemics and the Rule of Intensity Attraction
I am going to try explaining Jakobson’s famous article of 1948, which remains perhaps the single most influential study on the formal description of verbal morphology of all time, prefiguring Chomsky’s “Sound Pattern of English” and many others. Scholars have spent their lives working out the ramifications of Jakobson’s truly visionary 13-page sketch.
So in simple terms, or as simple as I can make them, for you who have learned a few, or maybe more than a few, Russian verbs and how they work.
First, morphophonemic transcriptions. This is the alphabet of the deep (abstract) base form of verbs. One abstract base form per verb. Choose as your basic form, Jakobson says, the one which may occur in the environment where the other one, too, may occur. What? Let me quote that precisely.
“We take as basic the alternate which appears in a position where the other alternate too would be permissible.” Take Russian я смотрЮ, pronounced smatr’—U and ты смОтришь, pronounced smOtr’—iš. (I write all stressed vowels as capitals). These are phonemic transcriptions, where we see that the vowel ‘o’ occurs under stress, while the vowel ‘a’ occurs outside of stress. Now, we choose the variant smOtr’— as basic because we could, conceivably, have a phonemic word smAtr’—, but we couldn’t have a phonemic smotr—U, because ‘o’ always reduces to ‘a’ outside of stress. That helps us pick the morphophonemic base: the one with ‘o’, even if ‘a’ occurs in most of the present tense forms.
A more complex example is the Russian word печь, ‘bake’, conjugated пекУ печёшь печёт печём печёте пекУт, past tense пёк пеклА пеклО пеклИ, infinitive печь. Now the phonemic transcription mirrors the softening of consonants and reduction of vowels: p’ik—U, p’ič—O-š, p’ič—Ot, p’ok—#, p’ik—l-A. Study these carefully. Soft ‘p’before the vowels. ‘e’ reduces to ‘i’ outside of stress. Past masculine has ‘o’, the other pasts ‘i’. What should be the basic form here? Here again we look for the stressed position. Now, ‘o’ is not admitted between two soft consonants, in normal standard Russian, so the infinitive is forced to печь , where both the p’ and č are soft (we don’t write č’to indicate softness, because č is always and everywhere soft). But both ‘o’ and ‘e’ can occur after a soft consonant and before a hard, as пёк ‘he baked’, and сек ‘he chopped’. So the basic morphophonemic form is p’ok—, unstressed. This, even though the vowel ‘o’ only actually occurs in the masculine past; that’s because it is forced out by the environment in all the others. We look at the phonemic shapes to see how the pronounciation will be, but we look to the morphophonemic shapes to see the underlying base.
So you are actually learning morphophonemics and phonemics when reading the first few pages of this article. Just another example or two. Take the verb лежАть ‘to be lying’, я лежУ ты лежИшь он лежИт они лежАт, лежAл, лежAла, gerund (with the meaning ‘lying, recumbent’ лёжа. Here are some phonemic shapes: l’iž—A-t’, l’iž—U, l’iž—I-š, l’Oža. Again the base form will be l’ož—a; ‘o’ is turns to ‘i’ unstressed after soft.
One more example: ‘to drink’, пить, пью пьёшь пьёт пьём пьёте пьют, пил, пилА, пили, imperative пей. In this verb we see an example of a situation that comes up frequently in the Russian verb: there seems to be one stem for the infinitive and past tense, and another for the present. Indeed, if we take the non-syllabic p’j— as the base (the present stem) we add the vocalic endings, and for the nonpresent forms, there has to be a vowel inserted, with which ‘j’ will alternate — ‘i’. Compare, for a very productive category, the present stems d’elaj—, pon’imaj— with the past stems dela—, pon’ima—. Here we see that a resonant (j), or potentially any consonant, will be truncated before another consonant — that is, any nonpresent ending. VC and CV are permitted across the boundary from stem to full form, but VV and CC are not.
In this way Jakobson turns the question “one stem or two” into a deeper observation about the behavior of morphophonemes when in contact with each other.
Wait a minute, how do we get the imperative пей? Why isn’t that the basic stem? Well, because the ‘e’ would have to be deleted in every other form, or changed to ‘i’. Better to assume that the imperative has an inserted ‘e’, since, of course, a word cannot be nonsyllabic in Russian verbs, so p’j— inserts the vowel but keeps the ‘j’ before zero. The ending of the imperative will be zero, as it is unless the ending is stressed.
If unstressed, the present tense endings begin with a high vowel, ‘u’ for 3rd person and ‘i’ for the others. This is called the rule of intensity attraction. The diffuse (high, or close) vowels i, u appear when the endings are unstressed, or of weaker intensity. Thus плАчут, плАчешь, плАчет, пИшешь пИшут, вИжу вИдишь, вИдют [this is older Moscow pronunciation for a present-day mid central vowel]. Note that e and и boil down to the same phoneme here, ‘i’, because if the e is unstressed (weak), it goes up to the diffuse, or weaker, high vowel, and the third pl ending я, if unstressed, in older Moscow norm went to у. (But not any more, which seems to vitiate the rule.)
More later. That wasn’t so bad, was it?
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Oh When the Saints
January 19, 2010
Oh When the Saints
I pull for the Saints only for the city’s sake. I don’t like football and don’t like to watch it; the emotional strain is overpowering and the brute physicality of the game numbs. I’m a baseball man. I like the long, slow, subtle poetry of the season.
Kurt Warner, in one play, was covered by Saints’ defenders ‘like a pack of wolves’. The winners willed themselves to victory by sheer straining effort — so unlike baseball, where all is restraint, calm, alert observation. The Cardinals had a fine, lithe runner, Hightower, who scooted to a touchdown on the very first play, plunging the Dome into tombal silence; they had a wonderful receiver who made his presence known, too late, in the second half. Yet generally the Cardinals impressed me as light, ethereal, quick but not thunderous, like the Saints. They didn’t have a chance.
It is true, Reggie Bush was thrilling. The touchdown run in the first half, when he found himself for a moment surrounded by defenders, and whirled two or three times like a dancer, and then just about literally disappeared from the scene for a score. Like Roadrunner. It was superb entertainment.
The flea-flicker, too, is a joy to behold — when it works, as it did Saturday.
The Saints, toward the end, refrained from smashing Warner to the ground, instead, supporting him when he was caught. A gallant gesture. So too, was Warner gallant, when he went after the Saint who had intercepted his pass — and, in the process, Warner was just about killed. He could have suffered a serious head injury, not a “shoulder injury,” which would have put me in the hospital for two weeks, while Warner returned to play the second half. He himself admitted he was concerned. “I will have to think about playing another year or not.” I’d say he’ll have to think. Don’t do it, man.
What’s going to happen next Sunday? The Saints have waited so long for this. Let’s hope Favre doesn’t carve us up for dinner. Kill ‘em, Saints! Hammer them! We can beat those Vikes! Who does Favre think he is, the old bastard, coming back at his age? Hammer him down, boys.
gmc
Oh When the Saints
I pull for the Saints only for the city’s sake. I don’t like football and don’t like to watch it; the emotional strain is overpowering and the brute physicality of the game numbs. I’m a baseball man. I like the long, slow, subtle poetry of the season.
Kurt Warner, in one play, was covered by Saints’ defenders ‘like a pack of wolves’. The winners willed themselves to victory by sheer straining effort — so unlike baseball, where all is restraint, calm, alert observation. The Cardinals had a fine, lithe runner, Hightower, who scooted to a touchdown on the very first play, plunging the Dome into tombal silence; they had a wonderful receiver who made his presence known, too late, in the second half. Yet generally the Cardinals impressed me as light, ethereal, quick but not thunderous, like the Saints. They didn’t have a chance.
It is true, Reggie Bush was thrilling. The touchdown run in the first half, when he found himself for a moment surrounded by defenders, and whirled two or three times like a dancer, and then just about literally disappeared from the scene for a score. Like Roadrunner. It was superb entertainment.
The flea-flicker, too, is a joy to behold — when it works, as it did Saturday.
The Saints, toward the end, refrained from smashing Warner to the ground, instead, supporting him when he was caught. A gallant gesture. So too, was Warner gallant, when he went after the Saint who had intercepted his pass — and, in the process, Warner was just about killed. He could have suffered a serious head injury, not a “shoulder injury,” which would have put me in the hospital for two weeks, while Warner returned to play the second half. He himself admitted he was concerned. “I will have to think about playing another year or not.” I’d say he’ll have to think. Don’t do it, man.
What’s going to happen next Sunday? The Saints have waited so long for this. Let’s hope Favre doesn’t carve us up for dinner. Kill ‘em, Saints! Hammer them! We can beat those Vikes! Who does Favre think he is, the old bastard, coming back at his age? Hammer him down, boys.
gmc
Oddments
January 16, 2009
Oddments
Some patches of thoughts. Some words where stress in Russian really makes a difference: трУсить трУшу means ‘go chicken, chicken out’, while трусИть мукУ means ‘pour flour’. Flour is мукА, while ‘torture’ is мУка. Those of us who read more literature than cookbooks tend to forget about flour.
We say ‘pour the water’or ‘pour the sugar’, while Russian has two verbs, лить for liquids, and сыпать for grain, appropriate for a people to whom bread is so important.
Someone says to Kirillov in Dostoevsky’s The Devils: Не вы съели идею, а вас съела идея, ‘you didn’t swallow an idea, you have been swallowed by an idea’, literally, you (acc) ate (vb) an idea (subj). The object-verb-subject word order, possible in this highly inflected language, is a good way to do a passivization, and here the speaker wants to keep the words in the same order in each parallel clause.
Ободрать, обдирать ‘strip (bark) of a tree’ and обобрать, обирать ‘pick (berries), take from’ both may mean ‘steal, fleece’. The prefix o(б) has the sense of movement all around the surface of a three-dimensional object or a group of entities, objects, or people, as in обходить все мазазины ‘go around to all the stores’.
The word for ‘now’ in Russian comes as two. Сейчас is deictic, that is, it has a precise nearness to the moment of speech, meaning ‘now’, ‘in just a minute from now,’ or ‘a moment ago’. Thus its tremendous frequency in spoken Russian: сейчас скажу, мама сейчас пришла, сделаю это сейчас же ‘I’ll tell you in a second’, ‘Mother just now came in’, ‘I’ll get it done at once’. It rarely is completely cotemporaneous with the moment of speech, as in ‘I’m now in the moment’. Note in rapid speech он ща придет ‘he’ll be here in a second’. Теперь, on the other hand, is non-deictic. Its function is textual, referencing the experiential past that led up to now. Теперь я могу жить и работать как следует ‘now I can live and work the way one should’, теперь мы начнем четвертую главу ‘we will now begin chapter four’, а теперь я сыраю романс Шумана, ‘and now I will play a Schumann romance’.
The word давно ‘a long time (ago)’ is deictic and refers to the speech event, unlike долго ‘for a long time’. Oн давно умер ‘he died a long time ago’, это было давно уже ‘this was a long time ago’. In a related sense the word refers to an event or a process which took place, or began to evolve, a long time ago, seen from the speech time, and is still going on. Он давно спит, мама давно пришла ‘he has been asleep for a long time’, ‘mother arrived quite a long while ago’. It can refer to an event which preceded another past event by a long time: он давно уже стал врачом в нашей деревне, когда его жена уехала в Петербург, ‘he had already long since become a doctor in our village when his wife left for Petersburg’. This is effectively a contextual pluperfect, with давно and a distant-past P verb.
The constative past I, which I discussed recently in my аspect blogs, refers to a past event which is not deictically connected with the present moment. Я читал Войну и мир,vs. я прочитал Войну и мир ‘I have read War and Peace (and we can now talk about it)’.
Nouns, too, can have different kinds of aspectual dimensionalities. Compare ‘old house’, ‘old dog’, ‘old man’, ‘old exercise’, ‘old student’ (?), ‘old picture’. In each case in both English and Russian we have the same adjective. The word старинный adds a patina of positive value to the last period of age, which may last well beyond the expected. Старинная ваза ‘antique vase’, старинные обычаи ‘old-fashioned customs’ (this may be condescending, which is one of the ways we look upon age). Старый праведник ‘the old righteous man’ is incongruous, but старый сладострастник, or, as Connie Garnett translated this phrase in The Brothers Karamazov, in her illimitable Victorian English, ‘the old voluptuary’. In English we can say ‘the old bastard’ of a man who is quite young; Southerners say ‘this old hole’ as a kind of affectionate-augmentative. The title of the TV show This Old House names a house that isn’t necessarily old at all, but has gone through at least one past stage and needs to enter a new one.
Aspect is a way of viewing, of understanding. of entering into entities and becoming one with them. In Slavic aspect has a way of sneaking up on you and tricking you. Remember our old friend пИсать пИсаю ‘urinate’? Well, there’s a common verb записать meaning ‘note down, register’, and the past passive participle is записан. So that a записанный лифт can be a ‘registered elevator’ or, possibly, especially in Russia, a ‘pissed-on elevator’ (cf. Белки и Вова: “Нет, Белка, нет, нельзя!”)
Well.
gmc
Oddments
Some patches of thoughts. Some words where stress in Russian really makes a difference: трУсить трУшу means ‘go chicken, chicken out’, while трусИть мукУ means ‘pour flour’. Flour is мукА, while ‘torture’ is мУка. Those of us who read more literature than cookbooks tend to forget about flour.
We say ‘pour the water’or ‘pour the sugar’, while Russian has two verbs, лить for liquids, and сыпать for grain, appropriate for a people to whom bread is so important.
Someone says to Kirillov in Dostoevsky’s The Devils: Не вы съели идею, а вас съела идея, ‘you didn’t swallow an idea, you have been swallowed by an idea’, literally, you (acc) ate (vb) an idea (subj). The object-verb-subject word order, possible in this highly inflected language, is a good way to do a passivization, and here the speaker wants to keep the words in the same order in each parallel clause.
Ободрать, обдирать ‘strip (bark) of a tree’ and обобрать, обирать ‘pick (berries), take from’ both may mean ‘steal, fleece’. The prefix o(б) has the sense of movement all around the surface of a three-dimensional object or a group of entities, objects, or people, as in обходить все мазазины ‘go around to all the stores’.
The word for ‘now’ in Russian comes as two. Сейчас is deictic, that is, it has a precise nearness to the moment of speech, meaning ‘now’, ‘in just a minute from now,’ or ‘a moment ago’. Thus its tremendous frequency in spoken Russian: сейчас скажу, мама сейчас пришла, сделаю это сейчас же ‘I’ll tell you in a second’, ‘Mother just now came in’, ‘I’ll get it done at once’. It rarely is completely cotemporaneous with the moment of speech, as in ‘I’m now in the moment’. Note in rapid speech он ща придет ‘he’ll be here in a second’. Теперь, on the other hand, is non-deictic. Its function is textual, referencing the experiential past that led up to now. Теперь я могу жить и работать как следует ‘now I can live and work the way one should’, теперь мы начнем четвертую главу ‘we will now begin chapter four’, а теперь я сыраю романс Шумана, ‘and now I will play a Schumann romance’.
The word давно ‘a long time (ago)’ is deictic and refers to the speech event, unlike долго ‘for a long time’. Oн давно умер ‘he died a long time ago’, это было давно уже ‘this was a long time ago’. In a related sense the word refers to an event or a process which took place, or began to evolve, a long time ago, seen from the speech time, and is still going on. Он давно спит, мама давно пришла ‘he has been asleep for a long time’, ‘mother arrived quite a long while ago’. It can refer to an event which preceded another past event by a long time: он давно уже стал врачом в нашей деревне, когда его жена уехала в Петербург, ‘he had already long since become a doctor in our village when his wife left for Petersburg’. This is effectively a contextual pluperfect, with давно and a distant-past P verb.
The constative past I, which I discussed recently in my аspect blogs, refers to a past event which is not deictically connected with the present moment. Я читал Войну и мир,vs. я прочитал Войну и мир ‘I have read War and Peace (and we can now talk about it)’.
Nouns, too, can have different kinds of aspectual dimensionalities. Compare ‘old house’, ‘old dog’, ‘old man’, ‘old exercise’, ‘old student’ (?), ‘old picture’. In each case in both English and Russian we have the same adjective. The word старинный adds a patina of positive value to the last period of age, which may last well beyond the expected. Старинная ваза ‘antique vase’, старинные обычаи ‘old-fashioned customs’ (this may be condescending, which is one of the ways we look upon age). Старый праведник ‘the old righteous man’ is incongruous, but старый сладострастник, or, as Connie Garnett translated this phrase in The Brothers Karamazov, in her illimitable Victorian English, ‘the old voluptuary’. In English we can say ‘the old bastard’ of a man who is quite young; Southerners say ‘this old hole’ as a kind of affectionate-augmentative. The title of the TV show This Old House names a house that isn’t necessarily old at all, but has gone through at least one past stage and needs to enter a new one.
Aspect is a way of viewing, of understanding. of entering into entities and becoming one with them. In Slavic aspect has a way of sneaking up on you and tricking you. Remember our old friend пИсать пИсаю ‘urinate’? Well, there’s a common verb записать meaning ‘note down, register’, and the past passive participle is записан. So that a записанный лифт can be a ‘registered elevator’ or, possibly, especially in Russia, a ‘pissed-on elevator’ (cf. Белки и Вова: “Нет, Белка, нет, нельзя!”)
Well.
gmc
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Aspect II
Aspect II
January 12, 2010
Let’s look again at how aspect is formed. Take a telic I verb, that is, one that aims at a goal, a completion or boundary-crossing, such as искать ‘look for, search for’, (ищу ищешь ищут) a telic verb that is resolved in the moment of discovery. With the prefix раз– the diffuse, bare verb gains a kind of contoured, more specified, concretized meaning, ‘search with intensity, across a certain territory’; the P разыскать means to search out and successfully find. The marked derived I разыскивать is a contoured process verb culminating in the achievement event itself. Cf. рвать I ‘tear’, P оторвать ‘tear off’, разорвать ‘tear up’. This is always a happy blending of prefix and root verb, and can be compared to English function word and verb, as ‘seek out’, ‘find out’, ‘look up’, ‘write down’, ‘sing through’. The verb alone is always a diffuse and unshaped notion, while the function word, or prefix, gives it contour, direction, territorial locus.
A key difference is the extra sharpness of focus we get in the inevitable Russian I ~ P, or P ~ I. If the verb is P, you know some sort of goal has been reached. If the verb is I, however, as in English, only context can tell you. So I is excellent for simply naming a process, activity, or state, without saying there is a boundary. This is especially interesting in the I past ‘constative’, or naming an event that ‘happened’ once, at least, in the past, without asserting any change of state.
Here are some examples of the I constative. Приходила мама ‘mother came’ (implying, most likely, that she left again and is no longer there), vs. пришла мама ‘mother came (she arrived, she is here now), which is very close to a perfect in meaning, with present relevance. Cf. кто здесь открывал окно? who had the window open here? (implying it is now closed, but the wind blew over a flower pot), vs. кто здесь открыл окно? ‘who opened the window here?’ (the window is wide open at the moment of speech). Some of the restrictions on these constatives are very strange and counter-intuitive. In wh- questions ‘asking for the agent or instigator’, the I is very common: кто сгроил этот дом? ‘who build this house?’ (the completed building is in plain view). One does not say, however, кто писал Войну и мир? ‘who wrote War and Peace?’; one must say, willy-nilly, кто написал Войну и мир?, with the P verb. Ехplanations for this are ad hoc: this is an eternal work of art and exists beyond a printed book or a cybertext, etc., which, in their appeal to aesthetic nirvana don’t strike me as convincing.
The I is supposed to be possible in the constative meaning if the focus is diverted from the essential event itelf. Example. You see a friend who has a nice haircut. You say: — Tебя неплохо подстригли, ‘You have a nice haircut there’. Спасибо, he says. You say: Кто подстригал? ‘who cut your hair?’ In a sense the I here is a kind of verbal reference to the original P event. Example. Здесь я написал мое первое любовное письмо к Аде ‘here I wrote my first love letter to Ada.’ Then you add писал карандашом ‘I wrote it in pencil’, referring to the first instance, a P, with an I, and focusing on the instrument.
So it is not true, not true at all, that a I past can be translated “was ....x-ing,” as in French j’écrivais le livre ‘I was writing the book’. Any event in Russian can be denuded of its goal or boundary-crossing and made into a ‘mere’ process.
January 12, 2010
Let’s look again at how aspect is formed. Take a telic I verb, that is, one that aims at a goal, a completion or boundary-crossing, such as искать ‘look for, search for’, (ищу ищешь ищут) a telic verb that is resolved in the moment of discovery. With the prefix раз– the diffuse, bare verb gains a kind of contoured, more specified, concretized meaning, ‘search with intensity, across a certain territory’; the P разыскать means to search out and successfully find. The marked derived I разыскивать is a contoured process verb culminating in the achievement event itself. Cf. рвать I ‘tear’, P оторвать ‘tear off’, разорвать ‘tear up’. This is always a happy blending of prefix and root verb, and can be compared to English function word and verb, as ‘seek out’, ‘find out’, ‘look up’, ‘write down’, ‘sing through’. The verb alone is always a diffuse and unshaped notion, while the function word, or prefix, gives it contour, direction, territorial locus.
A key difference is the extra sharpness of focus we get in the inevitable Russian I ~ P, or P ~ I. If the verb is P, you know some sort of goal has been reached. If the verb is I, however, as in English, only context can tell you. So I is excellent for simply naming a process, activity, or state, without saying there is a boundary. This is especially interesting in the I past ‘constative’, or naming an event that ‘happened’ once, at least, in the past, without asserting any change of state.
Here are some examples of the I constative. Приходила мама ‘mother came’ (implying, most likely, that she left again and is no longer there), vs. пришла мама ‘mother came (she arrived, she is here now), which is very close to a perfect in meaning, with present relevance. Cf. кто здесь открывал окно? who had the window open here? (implying it is now closed, but the wind blew over a flower pot), vs. кто здесь открыл окно? ‘who opened the window here?’ (the window is wide open at the moment of speech). Some of the restrictions on these constatives are very strange and counter-intuitive. In wh- questions ‘asking for the agent or instigator’, the I is very common: кто сгроил этот дом? ‘who build this house?’ (the completed building is in plain view). One does not say, however, кто писал Войну и мир? ‘who wrote War and Peace?’; one must say, willy-nilly, кто написал Войну и мир?, with the P verb. Ехplanations for this are ad hoc: this is an eternal work of art and exists beyond a printed book or a cybertext, etc., which, in their appeal to aesthetic nirvana don’t strike me as convincing.
The I is supposed to be possible in the constative meaning if the focus is diverted from the essential event itelf. Example. You see a friend who has a nice haircut. You say: — Tебя неплохо подстригли, ‘You have a nice haircut there’. Спасибо, he says. You say: Кто подстригал? ‘who cut your hair?’ In a sense the I here is a kind of verbal reference to the original P event. Example. Здесь я написал мое первое любовное письмо к Аде ‘here I wrote my first love letter to Ada.’ Then you add писал карандашом ‘I wrote it in pencil’, referring to the first instance, a P, with an I, and focusing on the instrument.
So it is not true, not true at all, that a I past can be translated “was ....x-ing,” as in French j’écrivais le livre ‘I was writing the book’. Any event in Russian can be denuded of its goal or boundary-crossing and made into a ‘mere’ process.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Verbal Aspect I
January 9, 2010
Dear Students,
Well, here I am again with my boring, rambling lectures. I look forward to the Spring semester, as my classes get pared down, the chaff drops away and the fruit of the field remains. Excellent! Welcome to 2010, which in my numbering system for files, is 10. So January 9, 2010 is 100109. The first day of the year was a binary number, 100101, which, as you know, is 29. Is that right? Sounds right to me. Any mathematicians here?
You know that there is a binary opposition of two aspects in the Russian verb system, a privative opposition, wherein the perfective (P) always bears a semantic marker, and the imperfective (I), is unmarked. So we say the perfective signals change of state (A > B), crossing of a boundary, completion of an event or beginning/end of a process; the imperfective doesn’t signal anything at all. Formally, the P is marked by its prefix: прочитать –– читать, but the derived imperfective is marked by its suffix: прочитать > прочитывать ‘read through’. The I usually bears one of two canonical meanings: it means an event or action in process: я читаю книгу, я читал книгу ‘I am reading a book’, ‘I was reading a book’ or an iteration of events: ‘I read books’, ‘I used to read books’. Note that the I past can mean ‘I read the book’, ‘I read a book’: я читал книгу. But the P past я прочёл/я прочла книгу means ‘I read the book, finished it’, or, with perfect meaning, ‘I have read the book’. These meanings are specific to P; they are explicit, they are there, at hand. If the I means one of those, it is submerged in context.
There is a wide range of meanings here, as every single verbal idea has to be either P or I, but not both and not neither. As Jakobson used to say, “in English, verbs have aspects [e.g. progressive aspect: I am singing], but in Russian, aspects have verbs.”
This then entails that specific contexts have very specific ways of implementing the semantics of P and I. For example, to say something is forbidden, one uses the I; to say it is physically impossible, the P: нелься переходить улицу ‘do not cross the street/, нельзя перейти улицу ‘it impossible to cross the street’.
The imperative, when expressng a polite invitation to a social action, like ‘sit down’, ‘come in’, ‘take off your coat’, is normally I. So: садитесь, входите, раздевайтесь. Giving an order to a dog to sit, stand, or lie, one uses the familiar P: сядь, ляг! A doctor examining a patient may say сядьте сюда на стол, ‘sit over here on the table’, since politeness is not an issue. When responding to a knock at the door — and one doesn’t know who is there — one will use the P: войдите ‘come in’. If one recognizes the visitor, the polite I takes over: входите.
In the infinitive, when conceptualizing a complex action of intellectual experience, one has to use the P: я хочу увидеть Красную площадь, я хочу прочитать эту книгу, я хочу рассказать вам, как это было ‘I want to see Red Square’, ‘I want to read this book’, ‘I want to tell you how it was’. These forced P infinitives may strike us as too strict. Why P, when I don’t necessarily know if I want to read the whole book? And I thought увидеть meant ‘catch a glimpse of, see’. Well, not exactly always.
Still the basic meaning of I and P somehow is there. A good example: дом еще не загорелся (P), но несколько раз загорался (I ) ‘the house hasn’t burned down yet, but several times it caught on fire’.
Context is all.
gmc
Dear Students,
Well, here I am again with my boring, rambling lectures. I look forward to the Spring semester, as my classes get pared down, the chaff drops away and the fruit of the field remains. Excellent! Welcome to 2010, which in my numbering system for files, is 10. So January 9, 2010 is 100109. The first day of the year was a binary number, 100101, which, as you know, is 29. Is that right? Sounds right to me. Any mathematicians here?
You know that there is a binary opposition of two aspects in the Russian verb system, a privative opposition, wherein the perfective (P) always bears a semantic marker, and the imperfective (I), is unmarked. So we say the perfective signals change of state (A > B), crossing of a boundary, completion of an event or beginning/end of a process; the imperfective doesn’t signal anything at all. Formally, the P is marked by its prefix: прочитать –– читать, but the derived imperfective is marked by its suffix: прочитать > прочитывать ‘read through’. The I usually bears one of two canonical meanings: it means an event or action in process: я читаю книгу, я читал книгу ‘I am reading a book’, ‘I was reading a book’ or an iteration of events: ‘I read books’, ‘I used to read books’. Note that the I past can mean ‘I read the book’, ‘I read a book’: я читал книгу. But the P past я прочёл/я прочла книгу means ‘I read the book, finished it’, or, with perfect meaning, ‘I have read the book’. These meanings are specific to P; they are explicit, they are there, at hand. If the I means one of those, it is submerged in context.
There is a wide range of meanings here, as every single verbal idea has to be either P or I, but not both and not neither. As Jakobson used to say, “in English, verbs have aspects [e.g. progressive aspect: I am singing], but in Russian, aspects have verbs.”
This then entails that specific contexts have very specific ways of implementing the semantics of P and I. For example, to say something is forbidden, one uses the I; to say it is physically impossible, the P: нелься переходить улицу ‘do not cross the street/, нельзя перейти улицу ‘it impossible to cross the street’.
The imperative, when expressng a polite invitation to a social action, like ‘sit down’, ‘come in’, ‘take off your coat’, is normally I. So: садитесь, входите, раздевайтесь. Giving an order to a dog to sit, stand, or lie, one uses the familiar P: сядь, ляг! A doctor examining a patient may say сядьте сюда на стол, ‘sit over here on the table’, since politeness is not an issue. When responding to a knock at the door — and one doesn’t know who is there — one will use the P: войдите ‘come in’. If one recognizes the visitor, the polite I takes over: входите.
In the infinitive, when conceptualizing a complex action of intellectual experience, one has to use the P: я хочу увидеть Красную площадь, я хочу прочитать эту книгу, я хочу рассказать вам, как это было ‘I want to see Red Square’, ‘I want to read this book’, ‘I want to tell you how it was’. These forced P infinitives may strike us as too strict. Why P, when I don’t necessarily know if I want to read the whole book? And I thought увидеть meant ‘catch a glimpse of, see’. Well, not exactly always.
Still the basic meaning of I and P somehow is there. A good example: дом еще не загорелся (P), но несколько раз загорался (I ) ‘the house hasn’t burned down yet, but several times it caught on fire’.
Context is all.
gmc
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
New Hawk Flies Into Hall
January 6, 2010
At 2:00 pm EST today Andre Dawson was elected to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
A humble man who worked ceaselessly to perfect his great gifts, called “Hawk” for his intense gaze, he gave Cubs’ fans happiness in the arts of the outfield done well. They salaamed him in the right field bleachers for his dignity and his excellence, waiting, with just the right angle of vision, for Dawson to throw behind not a runner but the batter rounding first, or even to throw a batter out at first on a sharp single to right.
Only he and Willie Mays hit over 400 homers and stole over 300 bases. Well, Mays and Dawson and one other of ill repute, the bionic man Bonds, who squandered his own great gifts in dishonor.
Sandberg, another man known for silent professionalism, praised Dawson more than any other colleague and outspokenly demanded the election that at last, today, came to pass.
I remember Cubs announcer Jack Brickhouse, with the Expos at Wrigley, telling his listeners ominously, “And here comes Andre Dawson. He murders the Cubs here.” And inevitably, wham, there went the game again. But lo and behold (Lo and behold, said Humbert), Dawson became a Cub, under, for him, humiliating circumstances that we would not be given to understand for some time. And now hear Brickhouse: “Here’s Andre!” And there was hope again.
We also remember moments that are indelibly inscribed on the mind’s eye of imagination, indelibly, never to disappear. One day in Wrigley, the afternoon sun long in the sky, the Cubs trailing 6-4, two out, bottom of the ninth. It is a Saturday afternoon in July, in the 1980s; the stadium is filled with fans who didn’t yet have to pay $140 a seat (I know; I was there). A man gets on base; no matter who. Dawson is up. He gets a low curve ball over the plate but very low, and muscles it on a line over the basket in left to tie the game. A surprised roar of delight rises and echoes in the stadium, just as everyone is preparing for departure we are stopped in our tracks. The game goes on for several innings before the (inept) Cubs finally win a game that Andre willed them to win.
That’s one indelible memory; a truism, but a true one nevertheless.
gmc
At 2:00 pm EST today Andre Dawson was elected to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
A humble man who worked ceaselessly to perfect his great gifts, called “Hawk” for his intense gaze, he gave Cubs’ fans happiness in the arts of the outfield done well. They salaamed him in the right field bleachers for his dignity and his excellence, waiting, with just the right angle of vision, for Dawson to throw behind not a runner but the batter rounding first, or even to throw a batter out at first on a sharp single to right.
Only he and Willie Mays hit over 400 homers and stole over 300 bases. Well, Mays and Dawson and one other of ill repute, the bionic man Bonds, who squandered his own great gifts in dishonor.
Sandberg, another man known for silent professionalism, praised Dawson more than any other colleague and outspokenly demanded the election that at last, today, came to pass.
I remember Cubs announcer Jack Brickhouse, with the Expos at Wrigley, telling his listeners ominously, “And here comes Andre Dawson. He murders the Cubs here.” And inevitably, wham, there went the game again. But lo and behold (Lo and behold, said Humbert), Dawson became a Cub, under, for him, humiliating circumstances that we would not be given to understand for some time. And now hear Brickhouse: “Here’s Andre!” And there was hope again.
We also remember moments that are indelibly inscribed on the mind’s eye of imagination, indelibly, never to disappear. One day in Wrigley, the afternoon sun long in the sky, the Cubs trailing 6-4, two out, bottom of the ninth. It is a Saturday afternoon in July, in the 1980s; the stadium is filled with fans who didn’t yet have to pay $140 a seat (I know; I was there). A man gets on base; no matter who. Dawson is up. He gets a low curve ball over the plate but very low, and muscles it on a line over the basket in left to tie the game. A surprised roar of delight rises and echoes in the stadium, just as everyone is preparing for departure we are stopped in our tracks. The game goes on for several innings before the (inept) Cubs finally win a game that Andre willed them to win.
That’s one indelible memory; a truism, but a true one nevertheless.
gmc
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