On The Syntax Of Be Sentences In Russian

An essential guide to Russian syntax, which examines major syntactic structures and grammatical puzzles of the language.

Russian Syntax for Advanced Students is a textbook which illuminates relationships between words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. The book helps develop communicative skills for advanced mastery and constantly emphasizes the importance of accuracy in the use of syntactic structures.

Excerpt from Exercises in Russian Syntax: With Explanatory Notes, the Simple Sentence This is the first part of a two-volume exercises IN russian syntax designed for adult foreign students of Russian studying with or without a teacher. This book is not meant for beginners. In it special attention has been given to those problems of Russian syntax which generally prove to be particularly difficult to foreign students of Russian. Thus, the book comprises a large number of exercises on agreement and govern ment and on the uses of tense, aspect, and mood forms of the verb. The book also contains a number of lexical exercises. This fact is accounted for by the need to show how the lexical meaning of words may determine a particular syntactical construction. The commonest set expressions and colloquialisms in contemporary Russian are also dealt with in the exercises. The Notes following many of the exercises deal with those points of Russian syntax which usually present greater difficulty to foreign students of Russian. The contents of this book have been arranged in the order generally accepted for books on Russian syntax. There are, however, a few depar tures from that order. Thus, the theme Detached Parts of the Sentence has been divided into two parts: Detached Parts of the Sentence which do not Form a Construction follow the relevant sections on the second ary parts of the sentence. Detached Constructions (constructions with the adjective, the participle, or the verbal adverb) have been included in Volume 2 of this book. Such departures from the usual order are justified by teaching practice: the knowledge of the different types of complex sentences provides a better basis for studying the detached participle and verbal adverb constructions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This book provides a detailed study and a novel Minimalist account of copular sentences in Russian, focusing on case marking alternations (nominative vs. instrumental) and drawing a distinction between two types of copular sentences. On the assumption that Merge is defined in the simplest way possible, it is argued that not all syntactic structures are a(nti)symmetrical. One of the copular sentence types is analyzed as a poster child for symmetrical structures, while the other type is treated as asymmetrical. The originality of this study lies in treating the copula in the two types of copular sentences neither as completely identical nor as two distinct lexical items; instead, the two types of copula are derived through the process of semantic bleaching. Furthermore, it is argued that the two types of the copula need to combine with post-copular phrases of different categories. It is concluded that Russian draws a distinction between saturated DPs and unsaturated NPs, in spite of its renowned lack of overt articles.

This collection of essays grew out of the workshop ‘Existence: Semantics and Syntax’, which was held at the University of Nancy 2 in September 2002. The workshop, organized by Ileana Comorovski and Claire Gardent, was supported by a grant from the Reseau ́ de Sciences Cognitives du Grand Est (‘Cognitive Science Network of the Greater East’), which is gratefully acknowledged. The ?rst e- tor wishes to thank Claire Gardent, Fred Landman, and Georges Rebuschi for encouraging her to pursue the publication of a volume based on papers presented at the workshop. Among those who participated in the workshop was Klaus von Heusinger, who joined Ileana Comorovski in editing this volume. Besides papers that developed out of presentations at the workshop, the volume contains invited contributions. We are grateful to Wayles Browne, Fred Landman, Paul Portner, and Georges Rebuschi for their help with reviewing some of the papers. Our thanks go also to a Springer reviewer for the careful reading of the book manuscript. We wish to thank all the participants in the workshop, not only those whose contributions appear in this volume, for making the workshop an int- active and constructive event. Ileana Comorovski Klaus von Heusinger vii ILEANA COMOROVSKI AND KLAUS VON HEUSINGER INTRODUCTION The notion of ‘existence’, which we take to have solid intuitive grounding, plays a central role in the interpretation of at least three types of linguistic constructions: copular clauses, existential sentences, and (in)de?nite noun phrases.