[SEELA NGS] быbe fore or af ter ve rb

Fri Sep 17 03:27:19 UTC 2010

The field of linguistics isn't underdeveloped in Russian.  Rather, it just
isn't represented on SEELANGS.  There was a mass exodus of Slavic linguists
sometime in the late 90s when a general consensus began to emerge among the
Slavic linguistics community that SEELANGS and AATSEEL wasn't meeting the
needs of the Slavic linguist, which are more closely aligned with general
linguistics than literature, film, etc.

I would hazard to guess that it has to do more with information structure
than prosody.  Uwe Junghanns has done outstanding work on the same
phenomenon in Czech and shown that clitics are extracted from non-focused
domains, but remain in situ within the scope of focus.  To the extent that
is true for Russian (a hypothesis), the analysis would be something like the
following:

Я [купил бы эту вещь]FOCUS, но мне дали [бесплатно]FOCUS
[Я]FOCUS бы купил эту вещь, но ее уже купила [Ольга]FOCUS

2010/9/16 anne marie devlin <anne_mariedevlin at hotmail.com>

> 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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