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Introduction to Part II
- Slavica Publishers
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INTRODUCTION TO PART II It’s one thing to speak Russian well, another to understand how Rus-‐‑ sian is put together and how to make sense of the manifold irregulari-‐‑ ties that plague both native speakers and learners of Russian. Anyone with an expertise in Russian should have at least a basic idea of how to account for its inflectional irregularities, alternations in derivation, spelling conventions, fleeting vowels, and other important aspects of the language. Earlier we discussed how Russian sounds interact with each other in words and we presented a means for describing this in-‐‑ teraction. The following chapters will introduce a description of how Russian words are put together by means of roots, suffixes, and endings. Keep in mind that the goal of these chapters is to describe how Russian words are put together. We want to do so in a consistent and straightforward way and, during the process, we want to capture as many generalizations as possible about the modern language. The ap-‐‑ proach taken, therefore, is a synchronic account of Russian word for-‐‑ mation: we limit our investigation strictly to the language that is used by speakers today. We hope that this methodology mimics in some way the knowledge that native speakers of Russian gain about their language. The main questions we want to answer are: (1) What are the component parts of Russian words? (2) What happens when these components are combined? (3) How does our description simplify apparent irregularities in declension and conjugation? (4) What processes characterize word formation? A description of a language does not answer why a language is the way it is. It simply is a description of a current state. To answer “why,” we must look at the historical development of the language: what happened hundreds and thousands of years ago that made the lan-‐‑ 68 INTRODUCTION TO PART II guage as it appears today. That would be a diachronic description and will be the task of Part III. However, before we attempt to understand the “why,” it is important first to understand the “what.” ...