kakoj est' + li

[Alina Israeli]

John Dunn raises an interesting question which should be investigated: 
we obviously do not expect anything be replace by anything (for ex. stol 
by sobaka), so we have some kind of grammatical metonymy. This metonymy 
should be studied.

Here's an example of a poem I came across last night:

Не жди письма, любезная Матрена,
Писать я письма, знаешь, не мастак.
Идет война, осталось два патрона,
Ты извини, коль что–нибудь не так. (Ю. Беломлинская)

Ne zhdi pis'ma, ljubeznaja Matrena,
Pisat' ja pis'ma, znaesh', ne mastak.
Idet vojna, ostalos' dva patrona,
Ty izvini, kol' chto-nibud' ne tak.

On another day of the week I would have read it and moved on. But since 
I was reading it yesterday, after the ungrammaticality in poetry 
discussion the -nibud' immediately stuck out as a sore thumb. Not that 
it is totally incorrect, I could even give a grammatical reasoning why 
it is correct, but it is not usually said in this context.

Let's use Google again:

7,960 for "извини если что не так"
1,280 for "извини если что‒то не так"
2 for "извини если что‒нибудь не так"

The numbers speak for themselves.

So in this case -nibud' replaced  ø or -to, but they all are members of 
a close knit group of particles.

This grammatical metonymy would be an excellent topic for a dissertation.

Alina


John Dunn wrote:
> I suspect that the principles of poetic licence are broadly similar in English and Russian, but never mind.  The reason why I find poetic licence 'vaguely unsatisfactory' as an explanation is that according to my understanding of the term poetic licence is not licence to do what you like when you like; unless one is being intentionally transgressive (and Al. Arxipova's text doesn't strike me as that sort of writing), it should, in order to be effective, be founded on some sort of linguistic reality.  
>   

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