The Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Department of Slavic Languages
& Literatures,
and the Language Universals and Linguistic Diversity Colloquium of the Department of
Linguistics at Harvard University present a
Workshop in Russian Language and Linguistics
All students, teachers, and linguists welcome!
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
3:00-5:00
Barker 133
Featuring talks by:
Tore Nesset
University of Tromsø
"In which case are Russians afraid?"
Laura A. Janda
University of Tromsø
“Finding Meaning in Russian prefixes”
If you have any questions, please contact Steven Clancy
<sclancy@fas.harvard.edu<mailto:sclancy@fas.harvard.edu>> for more
information.
_______________________________________________
Abstracts:
“In which case are Russians afraid?”
Tore Nesset, University of Tromsø
A general rule in Contemporary Standard Russian is that verbs containing the reflexive
postfix –sja do not combine with objects in the accusative. For instance, dobit’sja
’achieve’ takes an object in the genitive and zanimat’sja ’engage in’ governs the
instrumental case. However, there are some exceptions to the rule. A case in point is
bojat’sja ’to be afraid of’, which is attested with accusative objects in modern Russian.
How frequent is the accusative with bojat’sja? Which factors motivate the use of the
accusative? This talk addresses these questions on the basis of data from the Russian
National Corpus.
“Finding Meaning in Russian prefixes”
Laura A. Janda, University of Tromsø
It is commonly assumed that the prefixes in Russian verbs like написать/na-pisat’ ‘write’
and сварить/s-varit’ ‘cook’ are semantically empty because the corresponding imperfective
verbs писать/pisat’ ‘write’ and варить/varit’ ‘cook’ have the same meanings. There are
nearly 2000 prefixed verbs like these, formed by combining approximately 1400
imperfectives with 16 prefixes. Textbooks simply require learners to memorize these
combinations and linguists have not previously provided any comprehensive analysis.
We set forward a new hypothesis, namely that the Russian verbal prefixes function as verb
classifiers. The purpose of the prefixes is to convert amorphous states and activities
into discrete events and to group verbs according to the types of events they express. In
other words, Russian prefixes are in effect a verb classifier system similar to those
proposed for Mandarin Chinese, Hindi-Urdu, and a number of Australian languages.
Our hypothesis is tested on the basis of quantitative research on corpus data and
statistical models (chi-square, logistic regression, etc.). Our webpage
http://emptyprefixes.uit.no/book.htm houses links to our database and statistical
models.
The description of Russian prefixes as a verb classifier system has pedagogical value
since we can redesign our curricula to teach students the system according to its
meaningful groupings rather than requiring rote memorization.
In short, the proposal to recognize Russian prefixes as verb classifiers supports the
community of people interested in Russian grammar to be better linguists, better
instructors, and better learners.