Моre Reflexives

Моre Reflexives

April 12, 2010

I have gone back to Townsend for some examples of reflexives with ‘certain’ prefixes. Among my favorites: я хорошо выспалась/-ся ‘I have gotten a good night’s sleep (slept myself out)’, я вам звонил, звонил, но не дозвонился ‘I called and called you, but couldn’t get you’, договорились ‘we’ve agreed (it’s settled, it’s a date)’! Катя заучилась ‘Katya has studied herself into a stupor’, Байрон исписался ‘Byron has written himself into exhaustion’, Саша и Маша затанцевались ‘Sasha and Masha have danced to utter exhaustion’, мои родители разошлись ‘my parents have separated’.

Here’s a funny sentence from that same Lesson X, Continuing with Russian: Oсторожно, князь! Обопритесь на мою руку ‘Careful, prince! Lean on my arm’. This reflexive verb is опереться, опираться ‘lean (self) on (someone or something)’.

The prefix o- becomes обо– before a root that contains a cluster, but has a mobile vowel or other full vowel in the following syllable in other forms, so it goes: обопрусь, обопрёшься, обопрётся, past tense опёрся, оперлАсь. I call this the ‘paranoic oбo-‘ because it may be seen in обо мне, они говорят обо мне ‘they are talking about me’, where the old soft jer has dropped out of the root in the dative case of the pronoun.

Another verb with this is обобрать, обобрал, обобрали, оберу оберёшь ‘to fleece, rob someone’. Here the longer prefix is seen in the infinitive stem, where there used to be a jer in the root; in the present perfective, the shorter form occurs since there is a full vowel in the root.

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