быbefore or after verb

[augerot]

I really hope you are correct. This is what I have been telling my students for the last 40 years! And none of the natives I have discussed it with have seriously disagreed with this approach.
jim

james e. augerot ________________________________________________
director, ellison center <http://jsis.washington.edu/ellison>
chair, russian, east european and central asian studies 206-685-3113
treasurer, south east european studies association <http://www.seesa.info/>
web denizen, <http://faculty.washington.edu/bigjim/>

On Thu, 16 Sep 2010, R. M. Cleminson wrote:

      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.



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