question for linguists

[George Fowler]

Emily,

>Can someone explain to me when you need to use "to, chto" to join 2
>clauses and when you should omit it? (I am concerned only with use in
>the accusative case.) For example, to translate "I want to understand
>what I do," a student wrote: Ja xochu ponimat' to, chto ja delaju.
>Is there any difference in meaning of the "to" is omitted? Some of
>my students learned about "to,chto" while studying abroad and now
>they are inserting it everywhere, but I don't know how to explain when
>not to use it. I've checked in numerous textbooks and reference works.

I reply to the list because this is an interesting question. There is an
excellent discussion of this and related issues somewhere in Charles
Townsend's Continuing with Russian (I actually taught a second year course
with that book once upon a time!). My (decidedly non-native) reaction is
that if "to" is present, the preferred reading with this word order is the
relative clause reading "I want to understand that which I am doing". If
omitted, but chto bears stress, you get an embedded indirect question: "I
want to understand, what am I doing?". The third possibility Townsend
discusses is the unstressed "chto", the complementizer "that", which
doesn't work here. In fact, I can't think of any sentence in which you
could reasonably get all three, i.e., a set of minimal pairs (well,
triplets). But you can come pretty close, e.g.:

1) Ja ponimaju to, chto ja delaju. 'I understand that which I am doing.'
2) Ja ponimaju, chto ja delaju? 'Do I understand what I am doing?'
3) Ja ponimaju, chto ja delaju oshibku.

If you vary word order, you can sometimes force a "to" in the sentences
representing the last two, to clarify what is going on, e.g.

3') To, chto ja delaju oshibku, ja prekrasno ponjal s samogo nachala.

Look at Townsend for some quite clear examples of all the variations.

George Fowler

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