Thoughts on Reflexives and Passives

March 27, 2010

Thoughts on Reflexives and Passives

There is another reflexive in Russian, of course; it is the pronoun себя (gen.-acc), себе (dat.-prep.) собой (instr.); the nominative is lacking. This is the Slavic cognate of Latin sui (gen.), sibi (dat.) se(se) (acc.). This form is in complementary distribution with -ся — where the one occurs the other may not.

I do not understand all the reasons underlying the choice in Russian. We say я видел себя в зеркале, я люблю себя ‘I saw myself in the mirror, I love myself’; я *любился does not exist, as so linguists star it as impossible, but, я влюбился в Аню ‘I fell in love with Anya’ is a standard locution.

If we said я *виделся it would be unacceptable, but мы часто виделись ‘we often saw each other’ is very common, cf. мы встретились утром на улице ‘we met in the morning on the street’. This is the ‘reciprocal’ reflexive, when both agents combine in a single action, or two or more people join in producing a single action.

Переписываться ‘correspond’, is often sited as a reciprocal of actions going back and forth, action A producing re-action B as in a tennis game. My favorite formation of this sort is перестукиваться ‘communicate by knocking (on metal pipes, for example, in prison). This is quasi-productive and you can try to make up your own examples and see if they exist. Перемигиваться ‘to exchange winks’, перекашливаться ‘to exchange meaningful coughs’.I think this would be a good construction for many semiotic systems, say animal communication.

A very interesting verb is считать кого кем shorthand for ‘consider someone (acc) someone (instr.). This is a ‘small clause’ verb, or a verb with double complement, object accusative and comparative entity, instrumental. It can take an animate (human, personal) subject and passivizes in -ся, so that it is a glaring exception to the rule that passives with the particle have to be inanimate. Not only that: it can take the full reflexive pronoun, with the true reflexive meaning. What a dream come true. Here are examples:

(1а ) Профессор считает Mашу (acc) хорошей студенткой (a good student) ‘the professor considers Masha an excellent student’
(1б) Мы все считаем mашу хорошей студенткой ‘We all consider Masha a good student’
(1в) Mаша (всеми) считается хорошей студенткой ‘Masha is considered a good student by everyone’
(1г) Mаша считает себя очень хорошей студенткой ‘Masha considers herself a very good student’.

Example 1a and 1б are transitive, with instr. complement. Example 1в is passive, with the agent in the instrumental (всеми) and the complement in the instrumental. Note that the two instrumental phrases are separated so that they don’t get mixed up. 1г is the reflexive, with the full reflexive pronoun in the accusative, and ‘good student’ in the instrumental as complement.

Why, I ask you, can’t all the passives/reflexives in Russian be this straightforward? (Again, see Townsend, Chapter X.) But they are not. Townsend mentions some formations with -ся which might be confused by students as reflexives or passives: Иван убился means neither ‘Ivan killed himself’ nor ‘Ivan was killed’. but ‘Ivan got smashed up to death’. But повеситься, утопиться do have the reflexive meaning, ‘to hang oneself’ and ‘to drown oneself’. What can one do?

The lesson is that general rules must be built up slowly, with numerous lexical exceptions. Себя always has some sort of ‘self’ reference, that is, it is always reflexive, while –ся only has one meaning for absolute sure in all cases, the syntactic one that it can’t be transitive, it can’t take an accusative (but can denote various sorts of other things).

More later,
gmc

Reflexives and Passives

March 25, 2010

Reflexives, Leading into Passives

Marmeladov asks Raskolnikov, in the stinking bar at a sticky little table, “My dear sir, may I inquire, are you in the service (изволили служить) or are you a student (учитесь)?” — Учусь, the latter replies, using a verb well known to 102 students to mean “I am enrolled in a course of study, I study.” You also know that when the ‘reflexive particle’ is removed, the verb is transitive: (вы)учить слова, урок. But what does the particle -ся mean, and how is it reflexive? And how many verbs are like this, that they may be used with or without the reflexive particle?

In the strict sense phrases like ‘wash (oneself)’, ‘shave (oneself)’ ‘comb one’s hair’ — мыться, бриться, причесаться are reflexive as the action is directed by the subject to himself, and transitive when used with an accusative, as in мыть машину. (The reflexive is what Chomsky calls anaphora, one of the keys to a child’s setting of linguistic parameters, supposedly, as she learns that ‘Mary sees her in the mirror’ means not Mary, and ‘Mary sees herself in the mirror’ is no one but Mary. This has a sort of Alice-in-Wonderland flavor to it,) But verbs in -ся have a large semantic range, well beyond reflexivization. The only thing they all share has been said to be intransitivity, that is, none of them appear with an object in the accusative. So: ‘study the Russian language’ is учиться русскому языку, with the dative, ‘fear lions’, бояться львов, with the genitive. This is said to be so as the particle is a trace of an accusative meaning ‘self’, as in защититься от врага ‘to defend oneself from the enemy’. In some Slavic languages, such as Czech, reflexives that semantically ‘feel like’ transitives have developed accusatives, especially in the spoken language: učím se ruštinu ‘I am learning Russian’, with the reflexive se and the accusative (fem.) noun rustinu.

Is the particle ever part of a passive construction? Yes, indeed it is, but there are some important semantic and grammatical restrictions. First the subject may not be an animate, or especially a human animate being. Second, the verb must be imperfective.
So we do indeed have passives such as: Набоков говорил, что роман Дар писался во время войны “Nabokov said that the novel The Gift was written during the war.” This sentence is an elegant way of not mentioning himself, the agent. What if it were perfective, e.g., how would Nabokov say the the novel was completed (by him) during the war? Набоков говорил, что роман Дар был закончен/написан (им) во время войны. This structure can be unwieldy and about as elegant as ‘the ball was hit by Nabokov’. Russian can avoid these structures, those with a passive participle, an auxiliary, and an agent in the instrumental, by avoiding the perfective and describing the event as unfolding and imperfective.

With an inanimate subject and an imperfective predicate, we find lots of passives, such as дом строится нашей фирмой ‘the building is being constructed by our firm’.
A verb like возвращать(ся) ‘to return’ can be ‘go back’ when reflexive, and “take X (acc) back’ when not reflexive. We have: студенты возвращают книги в библиотеку ‘the students are returning the books to the library’, студенты возвращаются в библиотеку ‘the students are returning (i.e. going back) to the library’. We may think of the reflexive particle in the latter as bearing a reflexive, accusative meaning: ‘the students are returning-selves’.

What about книги возврaщаются в библиотеку? This can’t mean that the books are going back on their own steam; it must imply an agent. We could add студентами to this sentence and we would get a reasonably grammatical, although far-fetched sounding, sentence, meaning something ‘the books are being returned to the library by the students’. Passives like this, with the agent overtly supplied, always have struck me as awkward, just like ‘the book was completed by Nabokov during the war’. (See Townsend’s Continuing with Russian, Chapter X for his discussion.)

One linguist said that ‘Hubert loves God’ is good English, but ‘God is loved by Hubert’, the passive thereof, is fishy. Why do you think this is so? But it all depends. The past passive participle alone doesn’t sound awkard, and look what Majakovsky did with the form убит ‘killed’ — Убиты! / И все равно мне / он или я их / убил. ‘They have been killed/they are killed / and I don’t care / Whether it was he or I / who killed them.' Cf. also Lermontov’s great elegy on the death of Pushkin: Убит поэт, невольник чести ‘The poet has been killed, captive of his honor’. Look how the Russian ppp short form can contain an entire passive sentence within it: сказано, сделано ‘it is said, it is done’ (‘no sooner said than done’).

Turn to poetry to resolve and transcend the sophistries of grammar.

More on passives and reflexives will follow. This is a big subject that has always attracted the attention of Slavists.

gmc

Implosion of 204

The Implosion of 204

I’ve never had a course quite like this one. I haven’t given a single test or quiz the entire semester, and the students have had great difficulty, with but three semesters’ preparation, reading Преступление и наказание. And I have spent a lot of time preparing for class, much more than ever for an intermediate class. Perhaps that’s what’s wrong — I have read so deeply in Dostoevsky that... what?

I had great difficulty, too, when I read Пр. & н. for the first time, and in those days I didn’t have my edition lying around to help me. I say to you that any student in 204 willing to spend 2-3 hours of work each class period would be gaining a reading knowledge, with my aids, and, with active work on exercises and composition, she/he would be advancing her/his Russian superbly and they would feel good about it.

Especially valuable is the recorded text of the novel, which I have made available to everyone. I would be glad to give you individual help on taking apart the Dostoevsky text for grammatical purposes. We will try to do more of this in class.
You could make an exhaustive study of how participles and gerunds are used in literary narrative. For as long as you read Russian, you’re going to find them, and in my edition every last gerund and participle is translated and explained.

This, plus the inestimable intrinsic value, as they say, of the literature itself.
Many of you, or some, have worked, in spurts, like this, and done some excellent compositions with original ideas expressed cogently in Russian. And everyone has worked, at some time, or tried to, in good conscience. One or two people have taken the time to talk this over with me, which I appreciate. I know some of you, or many of you (многие из вас; this doesn’t mean absolutely many, but ‘many’ in the group of you) are disappointed to find that her Russian is not getting any better.

I feel like the Zen master who tells his apprenctices to sweep the floor and take out the garbage for a year, and come back in five years. I wonder, how does he feel, in fact?

I’m no Zen master, so I’ve no right to tell you to take out the garbage.
But it’s not over yet; maybe you will still learn some Russian!
gmc

Seeing into the Future

Seeing into the Future (continued)
March 17, 2010

The old legal codices of Russia abound in conditionals and future tenses, and also even the future perfect tense, or futurum exactum, as we read it in the elegant language of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district where in the crime shall have been committed. This means that first there is an alleged crime (‘shall have been committed’), and then the accused shall have the right to a speedy trial. Russian could express this by using a form of ‘be’ (future) and the l-participle (what is now the Russian past tense. Here is an example from the Русская правда, the Russian Law (Правда means ‘law’ here):

Пакы ли боудеть что татебно купилъ вь търгоу, или конь или порть или скотиноу, то выведеть свободьна моужа два или мытника. In contemporary Russian: если окажется, что куплено ворованное, то надо представить свидетелей, ‘if it turns out (= OR боудеть in its conditional sense) that what shall have been bought was stolen (татебно), two free witnesses (моужа два) must show this (that it was bought at market’).

The simple future is, as I mentioned last time, expressed by any of three or four modal verbs, each with basic semantics ‘want’, ‘intend’, ‘begin’, ‘turn out to be’, and so forth. But the senses are very labile. I found this example in Gorshkova and Xaburgaev’s Historical Grammar of Russian”, p. 314. Аже не отложишь лишнего дэла и всякое неправды мы хочемъ богоу жаловатися и темъ кто правду любить (Rizhskaja gramota), ‘If you do not cease (perfective future) from your malevolent act and all illegalities we shall be constrained (хочемь) to complain to God and to those will love the law.’ The first basic meaning of хотэти is ‘want, wish; intend’, and here the writer wishes to show what recourses he may have if the evil work of his opponents goes on: namely, God, and those who stand for righteousness in the law.

The future can, of course, be expressed by a perfective present, as in contemporary Russian.

Мы коня не дамъ ни продамы его ‘we will not give up our horse nor sell him’ (Rizhskaja gramota). Note николи же всяду на нь (коня) ни вижу е более ‘I will not ever saddle him (his horse) again nor see him again’; here, in the famous tale of the death of Oleg by his horse, we find a perfective verb with future meaning followed by an imperfective present, also with future sense. In the Laurentian ms we read: идэте с данью домови а я возвращюся похожю и еще ‘go home with the tribute and I will return (imperfective present) and gather more’.

And, indeed, we find lots of unidirectional motion verbs with future meaning, just as in contemporary Russian, German, French, English and so on. From a birchbark letter from Staraja Russa, 13th century: не шли отрока эду самъ и две гривны везу ‘don’t sense a servant, I’m coming myself and will bring two golden coins’. Contemporary Russian: летом едем в Россию, English: we are going to Russia in the summer, German: wir fahren nach Russland im Sommer, French: nous voyageons en Russie cet été (that French looks funny — can anyone correct me?)

I notice that writing я, ю is standard in Old Russian after hushers; this doesn’t indicate softness, rather a morphological marking, e.g. 1st sg present. Just like our students write хочю, чищю, вижю. I don’t think there is a single student ‘mistake’ — that is, a conscious, deliberate attempt to express something in Russian, not a slip of the pen, or a typo — that doesn’t have a prototype in the history of Russian.

So it you start saying буду посмотреть ‘I will look at’ in place of посмотрю ‘I will look at’ (perfective future), I’ll understand. Indeed, if you start writing буду пoсмотрел in the meaning ‘I shall have looked at (something)’ before event X takes place’, I’ll understand that you are making up a future perfect tense just as the Old Russians did.

Not to encourage mischief. But language is a game, you know, it is meant to be played by young and old.

gmc

In The Future Don't Make This Mistake

In the Future Don’t Make This Mistake
March 16, 2010

I always meditate on the reasons that students utter or write what they do in Russian. Why do they so stubbornly take so long, it seems to me, to learn what is so clear to me as the blue sky on a cloudless day. But there ‘s the rub — it seems to me because I know it as second nature, without questioning whether it makes sense, is counterintuitive, or maybe just a gratuitous solution to a problem in the language that might have been solved a dozen other ways.

Take, for example, my pious insistence that the imperfective infinitive, and it alone, is associated with phasals like начну, кончу and, of course the analytic ‘future tense’ formed by буду. No perfectives allowed. Further, the conjugated form of a perfective verb has a ‘future’ meaning. No if’s, and’s, or but’s — and I am sensitive to such linguistic metaphors. I do know in the back of my mind, of course, that there are lots of ‘exceptions’ to the perfective present = future tense, one of which I will mention here: the modal use of the P future.

Ask someone the time, and she has no watch. “Не скажу,” she says, meaning ‘I can’t tell you’, not ‘I will not tell you.’

The future tense itself is a variety of willed or predicted potentiality which has not occurred. The past can find witnesses and testimony, it may be narrated and celebrated and regretted and analyzed. The present, Nabokov said, is a luminous moving point at the crest of the vastness of the past. The future is a modal predication, a potentiality, a path not yet taken.

In Latin we learned amo, amas, amat, “I love, and so on,” amabo, amabis, amabit, “I will love, and so on,” amabam, amabas, amabat “I used to love, and so on,” as though they share equal and equivalent places in the synopses.

I blithely keep saying спрошу means ‘I will ask’, while буду спрашивать, also future, means ‘I will be asking, will ask repeatedly.’ How far from the truth this might have been, but for a different historical development! In the twelve and thirtreenth centuries Russian had a very different system, though we really aren’t sure, beyond textual examples, how it really worked.

But listen to this: it appears that, for some writers, or speakers, any modal verb: хотэти ‘want, wish’, имати ‘have to, possess’, начати ‘begin’, быти ‘be’ may be used with the infinitive of either aspect, to make a kind of future, but a kind that probably differentiated carefully among the modals. I repeat: with an infinitive of either aspect, not merely imperfective. Further news for the Delphic oracle: the present tense itself, in some usages, seems to mean future — the present tense of either aspect.
This sounds like our students’ delight: use any modal, any aspect, and, as with Humpty Dumpty, it means future, if I want it to mean future.

(By the way, as an aside: I find the verb хотэти with the first plural хочем, just like our students: хочу, хочешь, хочет, хочем, хочете, хочут. Why on earth didn’t it stay that way?)

The forms of буду аre often used in conditionals with the modal meaning ‘if it should happen, if it turns out’.

More later,
gmc

Taking notes; Chomsky attacks my teaching

Note-taking; Chomsky attacks language teaching

When I was a student, I took notes in class in notebooks that were meant to be kept to the end of the term. I wrote down the instructor’s central points, his likes and dislikes — with lots of doodles and fanciful drawings on the side, like Dostoevsky did in the pages of his novels, except that he could really draw (so also could Pushkin and Lermontov, but not I). In a language class I would invariably note down the main thrusts of the drills, conversations, and lectures, unless, of course, it was all too boringly obvious anyway. I would use class notes to study for the finals. It is a very good system, but one which, I note to my sorrow and dismay, students have long ago abandonned. They often sit in class as though at an aesthetic experience, like a bullfight, say, or a play. More like a play or a pantomime, I suppose, in my classes. They think, of course, that they will remember everything important. Nothing can be any further from the truth.

You all ought to do this. What’s more, you should print out my “work for the week” files and realy pour over them, beccause they are the keys to the course. You may choose not to do this, but you lose, you lose.

Still, my policy is never to instruct students on methodology of learning. Instead, I coddle them by printing out numerous copies of the work and passing them out to helpless-looking students, more out of pity than anything else. In 204 I passed out seven such copies, to seven helpless-looking, but otherwise very intelligent, students. I could go on, but I won’t.

Now for the intrinsic weaknesses of lerarning a language in an academic environment. Chomsky always told me not to teach Russian, because nobody knows how people can learn it. “It’s a hopeless, useless task,” he told me, with his usual exaggerated sarcasm. “What you will end up doing is getting people enthusiastic about going there for themselves.” I guess he was right. All the grammar we teach is taught not by the natural methods that people use to learn.

Case in point: my latest quiz, focusing on, among other things, к Ивану, к бабушке, у Ивана, у бабушки. You all had the preposition к engraved in your alpha waves when you came for the quiz yesterday, and so you started writing к Москвe, к русскому уроку in motion expressions, when you’re supposed to say в Москву, на русский урок. It’s our fault for focusing on so many details at once. A child, learning, will also over-generalize, but he will adjust with lightning speed to the context that shapes the details.

Another example: a few weeks ago we learned спасибо за книгу, спасибо за кассеты ‘thanks for the book’, ‘thanks for the cassettes’. Now in our recent 102 quiz, you were thinking ‘Vova wants her to bring something for Belka,’ so the very best students wrote принести колбасу (что–нибудь) за Белку. Not right, but a brilliant extension, or abductive jump, made with the alacrity of a child’s brain.

I still believe it is possible to learn something in a language class, but Chomsky now tells me: “Yes, they will learn something, but you won’t know what.” He’s a bit too sure of himself, isn’t he?

gmc

Definitely

March 15, 2010

Definitely

Like ждать, which may take the accusative with a definite and a genitive with an indefinite, there are many perfectives with accusative vs. imperfectives with genitive that do this too. Выпил воду ‘he drank up the water (acc), пил воды ‘he drank some water (gen. partitive)’. There are other variations of this, and the overt aspectual and nominal categories do not in themselves mark definiteness.

The category of definiteness can, however, be marked by proper names, as we have seen, by possessive and demonstrative pronouns — they all presuppose a context — and by a wide variety of pronominal anaphoras.

I like literary examples, as you know. Remember in Dostoevsky’s The Demons, when Petr Verkhovensky comes to egg Kirillov on to his promised suicide, which V. is going to use to his own nefarious ends, he says “Я за тем самым.” “I’ve come for ‘it’, or ‘for that very thing’. Этот самый ‘that very same, that same person (we two were thinking about). Это, ‘this; that’ as introductory element is used to pronominalize any new entity, abstract, concrete, singular or plural, idea, complex background — anything. Это — мои родители. Это — очень точное определение понятия пост–советское. ‘These are my parents. This is a very precise definition of the concept ‘post-Soviet’.

The demonstrative это, used to as an attributive, bears agreement but can also be used to refer to anything. As in English.
Миша хочет стать партнером в нашей фирме, и пишет мэйлы всем знакомым, просит их помощи. Ты знаешь об э т о м ?
“Misha wants to become a partner in our firm, he’s writing emails to all his friends and acquaintances and asking their help. Do you know about this?”

Demonstratives in Russian may be pressed into service whenever their referentiality can make a definite precisely definite, as in relatives, where тот is useful.

Я поставил ту книгу, о которой ты спросил, в твой ящик. ‘I put the (that) book you asked about in your mailbox.’
In Czech and Polish the demonstrative ten is so frequent in definite senses that it is verging on acquiring the status of a definite article.

In Russian and Czech the demonstrative can be used in place of a pronoun. На улицe я увидел нескольких студентов, но тe меня не заметили. 'On the street i say several of my students, but they didn't notice me.'

Conversely, in many of our familiar European languages, the numeral ‘one’ is the eventual source for the indefinite article, as German ein, French un, and, of course, English a(n).

Still, you have to admit that in the North Slavic languages — Russian, Ukrainian, Belorusian, Czech, Polish, Sorbian — there exists no overt category of definiteness. And you have to admit that the speakers of those languages know what this means, and have a devil of a time learning how to implement definiteness in English. It’s the last thing they learn, if ever.

gmc

Waiting for Godot

March 12, 2010

Waiting for Godot

‘Wait for’ in Russian is expressed by the verb ждать with the accusative or the genitive case. When with the accusative, it marks a definite noun phrase; with the genitive, the phrase is indefinite. This is a slight simplification of the facts, but it’s so.

— Мы ждём поезда. We are waiting for a train (or simply: the train, any train).
— Мы ждём поезд в Петербург. We are waiting for the Petersburg train.
— Мы ждём письма от родитилей. We are waiting for a letter from our parents.
— Мы ждём письмо, которое должно содержать деньги. We are waiting for a/the letter which should contain some money.

An extended meaning of this verb is ‘hope for, await’; it usually is associated with the genitive, as indefinite. Я жду окончательной победы ‘’I expect a final victory’.

Since proper names are by definition definite, they always come in the accusative: я жду брата, жду сестру и маму.

How can we tell that брата is accusative, since the animate accusative form is taken from the genitive? We can’t until we see an example with an obvious accusative, like Женю, Ваню, сестру, маму.

‘I am expecting (I am pregnant)’ is жду ребёнка. I think this is probably genitive, but you can argue this.
How can a Russian dictionary tell us what case or cases a verb takes? Look ждать up in Ожегов and you will find an example leading off the discussion which has кого–что ‘whom/what’, which is a clear indication of the accusative — if it were only genitive, you’d find кого–чего. After all, Russians don’t know about definiteness and indefiniteness, but they do know that кто что, кого чего, кому чему, о ком о чём, кем, чем is a paradigm to help find case endings.

Is this any help, Sasha?

gmc

Definiteness and Indefiniteness

March 10, 2010

Definiteness and Indefiniteness

Russian, as we know, has no articles. Indeed, words like ‘a, an, the’ prove to be the most difficult for L2 learners of English to master. ‘I read book,’ says the learner. But in English an entity has to be categorized by how much the speaker and his listeners know about it. If a Russian has been telling you that he’s reading a book in English, and you see him the next day and he says “I read book,” you can reconstruct ‘I am reading the/that book (I told you about)’ out of the sentence. But without context we are helpless. So what book?

When we use ‘the’, or proper names, we assume some past context. “Old man Fisher came.” “The cat got in the fishbowl.” “Want to go to Couter’s tonight?”

When we use ‘a’ we are introducing a new entity into the conversation that hasn’t been identified or given any context. “There is a strange man in the waiting room.” “Did you run through a red light on the way home tonight?” In the former sentence, ‘there is’ is a way of signalling the introduction of a new, specific-indefinite entity. In the second, the question signals that the noun phrase ‘a red light’ is indefinite but non-specific. We want to know whether any red light was encountered. “Did you know that you ran a red light tonight?” Here the speaker is informing his interlocutor about a specific entity that he wants to mention.

Now, what about Russian? Names, as in English, are definite, and are treated as such. — Приходила Ирина. ‘Irina was here.’ (Note the I verb, hinting that she came and subsequently left.) — Не хочешь к Старой лошади сегодня вечером? ‘Don’t you want to go to the Old Horse [a bar] tonight?’

But what about common nouns, nouns that are not proper names? Here the flexible word order and distinctive intonation of Russian both play big roles. The new information, or the rheme, usually comes at sentence-end; so also, do indefinites.
— В комнате стоит незнакомый человек. — Незнакомый человек стоит в комнате.
‘A strange man is in the room.’

— Кто читает? — Читает Маша. ‘Who is reading? Masha is reading.’ In this sentence we see that a definite can also be in the final position of the rheme or new information. So also Вчера на улице я видел вашу сестру. ‘I saw your sister on the street yesterday.’

So context is all-important for identifying an indefinite. Читая Достоевского, я входил в новый, чудесный, совершенно незнакомый мне душевный мир. ‘As I read Dostoevsky, I entered a new, miraculous new world that had been completely unknown to me.’

Gogol played with definiteness as he did with all grammatical categories. Look at the beginning of Шинель, The Overcoat. В департаменте...но нельзя сказать, в каком департменте. Ничего нет сердитого всякого рода департаментов... Итак, департамент, о котором идет дело, мы назовем одним департаментом. Итак... в одном департаменте служил один чиновник.

‘In a department...but I can’t say in what department. No one is more easily angered than departments of all sorts... So, the department in which our business is taking place, we will call “a certain department.” So... in a certain department there worked a certain civil servant.’

‘Certain’, and Russian один, may mark a specific indefinite that the speaker knows something — perhaps a great deal — about. Not in every case does English ‘certain’ answer Russian один.
— У него в поведении какая–то угловатость, нескладность. ‘In his behavior there is a certain angularity, a stiff unjointedness.’ The indefinite какой–то marks a specific indefinite which the speaker can’t yet define more closely.

The indefinite какой–нибудь, on the other hand, is for an entity which is probably non–specific. This we see in questions, as in у вас есть какие–нибудь вопросы, ‘do you have any questions?’

Next time: how the authors of Начало (correctly! for a change) explain the definiteness/indefiniteness of the object of ждать ‘wait for’.
gmc

Deixis; semantic questions

March 8, 2010

Deixis and Semantics

In elementary Russian we learn that the adverb долго means ‘for a long time’: я долго работал, ‘I worked for a long time’. But if we want to relate the ‘long time’ or extent of a process or state to now, that is, to relate this to the speech-time, we use давно, as in я давно работаю в Тулэйне, ‘I have been working at Tulane for a long time’. Note the wonderful English present progressive aspect, which is so difficult, ironically, for Russians to learn. ‘I work long time at Tulane’ just isn’t good enough in English.

When the postal lady in Начало wants to explain why she hasn’t gotten everybody’s magazines and newspapers delivered correctly, she says я недавно работаю на почте, ‘I’ve only recently been working at the post office’, literally ‘I not-long-time work at post office’. Cf. French j’habite ici depuis longtemps ‘I’ve been living here ‘since’ a long time, with that French adverb depuis serving to fix the start of a state in the past and carry it up into the present moment, just as давно does.


“Have you been studying Russian long?'
“Almost a year.”
— Вы давно изучаете русский?
— Почти год.

Suppose you want to say that a single event occurred a long time ago; the event is in the perfective past, say я написал письмо о новой квартире ‘I wrote a letter about the new apartment’, Insert давно: я давно написал письмо ‘I wrote a letter a long time ago’. This signals that the event of writing the letter was distant in the past from the reference point of the speaker, in this case, the present.

Suppose you are telling a story in the past tense. “I was at home after work. I had been home/had long ago arrived home a long time when the phone rang. It was my old friend Dmitriy.” Я был дома после работы. Я давно уже пришел домой, когда зазвонил телефон. This is like the pluperfect tense, which as you know, doesn’t exist as such in Russian. It may be helped along by the aspectual particle уже, as above. ‘I had arrived home long since when the telephone rang.”

Давным–давно ‘long, long ago’ is used to introduce and characterize the temporal distance of an event. It is narrative.
I like contraries, antonyms, and opposites. They often reveal an internal asymmetry, as in young and old, tall and short, quick and slow. We say ‘how old are you?’ and ‘how tall are you?’.The Russian word редко means ‘rarely’ and часто means ‘often.’ The word изредка, built out of the preposition из ‘out of’ and the word редко, is glossed to mean ‘sometimes; not often’, which is indeed not exactly the same as ‘rarely’. It is ‘rarely’ with something else added, perhaps an attentuative or a weakening of ‘rarely’; it is almost ‘sporadically’ but not quite ‘from time to time’. It is ‘rarely’, but not so baldly so, and it is not quite ‘sometimes’.

I believe there is no such thing as perfect synonymy; there’s always some subtle difference between two synonyms, be it register — the context of discourse — or style or nuance of diction.

Next time: how Russian expresses definite and indefinite articles.
gmc