[SEELA NGS] быbe fore or af ter verb

[anne marie devlin]

The field of linguistics and especially sociolinguistics seems to be severely underdeveloped in Russian.  The subject of language use has come up many times on this list, but we don't appear to have experts.  The answer to so many of these questions can only really be determined through extensive data collection - both written and spontaneous speech sources.  What needs to be determined is the who,  why , where and when of each variable.  What I mean by that is to empirically determine the demographics (if appropriate) of the users of one variable vs another - age, gender, class, geographical location etc., the reason for chosing one - for emphasis, covert/overt prestige, the linguistic environment in which one is favoured and finally in which circumstances/occasions one is more prominent.  Asking a panel of native speakers may not provide the answer as there is a well-known sociolinguistic phenomenon called the observer's paradox where speakers purport to use or not certain forms and this is not in anyway supported by empirical analysis of performance data.
These are fascinating questions and we would benefit from any input from a sociolinguist as without it my I fear we might lose our minds - as perfectly summed up by the title of the Pushkin poem previously quoted: 
"Не дай мне бог сойти с ума". 

Anne Marie 
 
> Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2010 12:26:29 -0700
> From: bigjim at U.WASHINGTON.EDU
> Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] бы before or after verb
> To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
> 
> 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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