Russian Nominal Semantics and Morphology

Preface

PREFACE The idea of writing a book on the interaction of the lexical semantics and the grammar, in particular the morphology, of the Russian noun arose in the middle of the 1990's. For a number of reasons, the genesis of the book was long and things changed in the course of time. However , the principal idea remained unchanged. From the very beginning , the book was laid out to show that the well-known grammatical structures of the different classes of Russian nominals are closely interconnected from a semantic point of view. They can be described as a coherent structure reflecting a limited set of semantic distinctions, rooted in the lexical-semantic classification of Russian nouns. Thus, the presentation focuses on semantics, both lexical and grammatical, and not least on the connection between these two levels of content. The principal theoretical impact of an analysis of this kind is the insight that a language structure is not a random collection of subsystems , but a comprehensive structure of interconnected oppositions, repeating the same semantic distinctions at different levels and in different lexical and grammatical classes. While the present investigation is synchronic, this idea can also be developed in a diachronic perspective . My latest co-authored book (Norgard-Sorensen, Heltoft, and Schosler 2011) essentially takes up this idea, presenting a theory of what we have labelled Connecting grammaticalization. The analyses in both books proceed from usage and aim at revealing features of the native speaker's language competence, thus representing a functional approach to language, but at the same time acknowledging certain basic concepts of structuralism, first and foremost the paradigm, as an essential feature of a realistic account of what a native speaker's competence is like. With this profile I believe this book will be of interest to both students of Russian and linguists with some command, stronger or weaker, of Russian. Students will see a pattern in what is traditionally described as disparate subsystems, and linguists will, I believe, be in- x RUSSIAN NOMINAL SEMANTICS AND M ORPHOLOGY spired to consider the above-mentioned theoretical points concerning language as a coherent system, determining usage. Since the book has been on its way for some years it has not been possible to take advantage of the rich electronic language resources that have been developed during the last decade. One of the few modern Russian text corpora available at the time when the project began was the Uppsala Corpus from which, consequently, I excerpted the majority of the examples (labelled "UC"). Other examples were collected during my readings of fiction and other literature, a few examples were constructed, and at the final stage of the work I supplied the already collected data with a few examples from the Russian National Corpus (labelled "RNC") and the Russian internet. It goes without saying that with this history of data collection some examples will appear disturbingly (or amusingly) "Soviet" in character. However, since the presentation is only marginally concerned with style and genres this will not have any impact on the results of the analyses. To ease the reading all examples have been translated into English. Over the years a number of people have been involved in the work on this book. I wish to thank Per Durst-Andersen, Henning Andersen, and Andrzej Boguslawski for valuable comments on early drafts of some of the chapters. Further I thank John Kendal who revised the text and tried to make amends for the shortcomings of my English. The text revision was financed by the Department of Cross Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Finally, lowe special thank to my colleague at the University of Copenhagen, Elena Lorentzen, who carefully considered the examples and, in addition, made a number of important comments on theoretical aspects and some of the analyses. These people all contributed to making this presentation better. Needless to say, I carry the full responsibility for all shortcomings-from simple typos to inconsistent formulations. ...