discourse words

[Alina Israeli]

Many thanks to Olga Yokoyama for defending the discourse words that  
traditionally earned a bad reputation being called crutches, sornjaki  
and many other things. A quick Google search of the subject gives you  
a number of citations. But I would like to mention a book edited by  
Denis Paillard and K. Kiseleva "Diskursivnye slova". (Moscow 1998)

In my translation class I actually teach the meaning of some of those  
words, like v principe, for example, and how to translate them into  
English. Learning to use them in a foreign language is a lot harder.  
This is a true sign of mastery of the language.

AI

On Nov 28, 2007, at 7:41 PM, Yokoyama, Olga wrote:

> [quoting Renee Stillings: Oh, and drop all the crutch words. Russian,
> both written, and verbal, is often littered with ambiguous
> (non-committal ...) terms like "v principe," "vozmozhno," etc. In  
> nearly
> all cases these can just be dropped for the sake of good  
> writing ... or
> speaking. I can't tell you how many times a question along the  
> lines of
> "How's the weather today?" is answered by "V principe, kholodno."  
> Is it
> or isn't it???]
>


Alina Israeli
LFS, American University
4400 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington DC. 20016
(202) 885-2387 	
fax (202) 885-1076
aisrael at american.edu




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