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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Businessmen And Ballerinas Take Different Forms: A Strategic Resource For Acquiring Russian Vocabulary And Morphology, Laura A. Janda
Businessmen And Ballerinas Take Different Forms: A Strategic Resource For Acquiring Russian Vocabulary And Morphology, Laura A. Janda
Russian Language Journal
Included in the tasks facing a language learner is the acquisition of a lexicon and a grammar. However, when the target language has inflectional morphology, these two parts of the language-learning task intersect in the paradigms of grammatical word forms because each open-class lexeme has a number of forms that allow it to express various combinations of grammatical categories. Among major world languages, Russian is relatively highly inflected, meaning that the challenges of acquiring vocabulary are compounded by the need to master the inflectional morphology. Even a modest basic vocabulary of a few thousand inflected lexemes has over a hundred …
Review: The Forms Of Russian, Grant H. Lundberg
Review: The Forms Of Russian, Grant H. Lundberg
Russian Language Journal
The Forms of Russian is a traditional approach to the fundamentals of Russian morphology based largely on the work of Jakobson, Levin, Lipson and Townsend. It is essentially the introductory course on Russian morphology that many, if not most, working North American Slavists took in graduate school. The work arises from such a course taught over many years by the author. The book is clearly intended for future teachers of Russian. The two main goals of the book are (1) to make working with and using Russian easier and (2) to explain how to establish a systematic description of Russian. …
Review: Russian Case Morphology And The Syntactic Categories, John Frederick Bailyn
Review: Russian Case Morphology And The Syntactic Categories, John Frederick Bailyn
Russian Language Journal
David Pesetsky’s Russian Case Morphology and the Syntactic Categories (MIT Press, 2013) is one of the most thought-provoking works of theoretical linguistics to appear in many years. It provides a startlingly original analysis of a well-known thorny problem of Russian morpho-syntax, embedding the analysis of that puzzle within a radical rethinking of the role of case in syntactic theory, and taking us on a journey of consequences and extensions that challenge one’s views of many aspects of minimalist theory, including key components of case theory, phrase structure, locality and others. If a monograph is to be judged by its creativity, …
Review: Fundamentals Of The Structure And History Of Russian: A Usage-Based Approach, David J. Birnbaum
Review: Fundamentals Of The Structure And History Of Russian: A Usage-Based Approach, David J. Birnbaum
Russian Language Journal
Fundamentals distinguishes itself from other English-language textbooks about the structure of Russian by being usage-based, which means that the authors eschew underlying abstract forms and ordered rules and instead anchor their synchronic description of Russian phonetics, phonology, and morphology in correspondences and choices among surface forms. (ix, 56ff.) The assertion that “a usage based description […] renders a better picture of [phonetic and orthographic] reality than the generative-based description” (56; bracketed text added) is self-evidently true, and it is hard not to appreciate the difference the authors draw between generative production and what they archly call degeneration in the case …
A Cognitive Grammar Approach To Teaching The Russian Case System, Carlee Arnett, Diana Lysinger
A Cognitive Grammar Approach To Teaching The Russian Case System, Carlee Arnett, Diana Lysinger
Russian Language Journal
This study examines modern Russian cases within a Cognitive Grammar framework. Grammatical case, as one of the fundamental language categories, has always interested linguistic researchers. In languages that possess case systems, virtually no utterance is possible without taking into account grammatical case. This grammatical category is very complex and its acquisition is an enormously arduous task for learners whose native language does not possess a case system or a case system that is not as pronounced as it is in the target language. According to Janda (2002), “the meanings of grammatical cases are probably the biggest obstacle faced by students …
Mind The Gap: English L2 Learners Of Russian And The Null Possessive Pronoun, William Comer
Mind The Gap: English L2 Learners Of Russian And The Null Possessive Pronoun, William Comer
Russian Language Journal
The personal possessive pronouns in Russian (мой, твой, наш, ваш, его, её, их) are taught very early in virtually all elementary textbooks of the language. At the point of their introduction, the problems that they most often pose for English‐speaking L2 learners are their morphology and the rules for agreement with the nouns they modify. For L2 learners, the usage and frequency of these pronouns at this stage in language study seem virtually to mirror English patterns. When introduced to simple sentences with finite verbs and complements as well as the “у кого есть что” construction, learners may (or may …