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