быbefore or after verb

[R. M. Cleminson]

A quick look at the Russian National Corpus reveals 148 instances of купил/а/и бы and 73 of бы купил/а/и.

If you want to do this properly, you will have to go through them and strip out instances of the former where the verb is the first word in the clause, and instances of the latter involving phrases such as вроде бы, будто бы etc.  Then you will have material for comparison.

Impressionistically (and waiting to be corrected), I would say the following.  The enclitic бы forms a single prosodic unit with the preceding word, and its position is determined, like that of the preceding word, not only by grammatical considerations but by the intonational structure of the whole sentence.

Consider:

Я купил бы эту вещь, но мне дали бесплатно.

Я бы купил эту вещь, но ее уже купила Ольга.

In other words, I think it probable that there is a tendency (but not a rule) for бы to follow the word that bears the major stress in the clause.  Unfortunately this is not a hypothesis that can readily be verified from written sources.  It would be interesting to know whether any research has been done on it.  Nevertheless, I think we can at least discount the theory that it depends on the laziness of the speaker.

----- Originálna správa -----
Odosielateľ: "Mark Kingdom" <k2kingdom at GMAIL.COM>
Komu: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Dátum: streda, september 15, 2010 04:19:43
Predmet: [SEELANGS] бы before or after verb

Hi all,

I wrote the following sentence to a Russian friend of mine:

Я купил бы эту вещь, но у меня нет денег.

She replied, (quoting) "...using бы after the verb is lazy, as if you are
giving yourself time to think of an excuse."

She says it is better to use бы before the verb: Я бы купил эту вещь, но у
меня нет денег.

I was taught that you can say it either way. What *is* the difference in
placement? Do you agree with my friend's statement?

Thanks!

Mark

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