Finale: Passives and Reflexives

April 2, 2010

More on Passives and Reflexives

Dear Students,
this is a particularly fun blog. Read it carefully.

Russian has a quasi-free syntax, which allows it to highlight new information, or the rheme, in sentence-final. Cf. this exchange: — Кто говорит? — Говорит Сидиров. ‘Who is speaking? Sidorov is speaking.’ Word order can be used to make a kind of syntactic passive. Старуху процентщицу убил не крестьянин Николай, а студент Родион Романович Раскольников. ‘The old usurer woman was killed not by the peasant Nikolay, but by the student Rodion Romanovich Raskol’nikov. Literally: ‘the old woman (acc) - killed - not Nikolay - but R.’ This is a lot nicer, to my ear, than the use of a ppp, as in Старуха была убита не Николаем, а Раскольниковым, with the auxiliary, past passive participle, and agent in the instrumental. More examples: объявление повесила секретарша, ‘the flyers were posted by the secretary’, меня похвалил сам президент, ‘I was praised by the president himself’, эти сведения нам передали начальники ‘we were informed (dat.) of these matters (acc.) by the bosses themselves (nom.). Cf. the topicalizer ‘это’ in these examples: это Раскольников убивал, это я написал эту длинную статью, это папа вымыл машину, ‘it was R. who was the killer’, ‘it was I who wrote that long article’. ‘it was Father who washed the car’.

A few more important and interesting non-passive -ся constructions: note the word найтись ‘to turn up’, not ‘to be found’. Бумажник нашелся в комоде ‘the wallet turned up in the dresser drawer’.

I like the so-called ‘reflexive of general characteristic’. Remember when Gurov first meets the lady with the little dog, and he uses the dog to get to the lady? When he offers a bone and the dog growls, Gurov shakes his finger warningly at him. The lady tells him: он не кусается ‘he doesn’t bite’. Another good one in this class is ругать кого, ругаться, ругать себя. The transitive means ‘curse someone out’, the reflexive particle, ‘to swear (as a characteristic)’, and the reflexive pronoun себя, ‘to curse oneself out’.

Note дверь открылась, дверь быта открыта, дверь открыли, meaning, respectively, ‘the door opened’, ‘the door was open’, ‘the door was opened’. The first is not a passive, but a kind of middle voice, or unergative, construction; some force or agent or instrument caused the door to open — this is not a passive. The second is a ppp, typical of a passive sentence, but also very often simply adjectival: дверь открыта ‘the door has been opened/the door is open’. The third is the useful personal indefinite construction, with no overt subject, the object fronted, and the verb a transitive without a nominative subject ‘the door has been opened’. Cf. ‘the stew is cooking slowly on the stove’.

The verbs ‘open’ and ‘close’ are important. от– (за–)крЫть, закрЫла, закрЫли; закрОю, закрОешь, закрОют. Similarly: мыть мОю мОешь мОют, мыл, мЫла, мЫли. These are the perfectives; imperfectives are закрывать, открывать.

Дверь открыли is a kind of indefinite passive with an implied human agent. If you don’t want to imply a human agent, but some kind of indefinite instrument, you can use the default neuter subject, as in the stock example отца убило молнией ‘father was killed by lightning’. But I prefer the great example from the Brothers Karamazov, when stinking Lizaveta somehow climbs over the wall separating the garden from the bathhouse. The narrator tells us ее перенесло, или перенесли, ‘someone carried her over, or something did’. This is effected by the change of just one letter.

I told you literature does it so much better than stock examples. ‘Father was killed by lightning’, indeed — that’s in the category of ‘the boy was playing in the garden with his aunt and his governess’. Give me a break. Remember how Nabokov almost flunked his American citizenship reading test. He correctly read the sentence ‘the child is bold’, and then added mischievously, ‘if you change one letter you could get ‘the child is bald’. (This was in the days before chemotherapy for children, he meant no offense.)

gmc