pseudocoordinates

[Rafael Shusterovich]

Hello John,

"vzjal i umer" means "he died at once", while "On slomal sebe nogu" only
means "he broke *his* leg" -- a slight escalation from "On slomal nogu",
where an elliptic construction (without "*his*") only theoretically may be
understood as "somebody's leg". In practical Russian, the phrase without
"his" is also perfect.

Regards,
Rafael

On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 11:30 PM, John Dingley <jdingley at yorku.ca> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> (Apologies for the lack of Unicode!)
>
> I have commented on John Dunn's "He went and broke his leg" as a
> translation for  Russian "On slomal sebe nogu" indicating that the English
> construction is mirrored in Swedish, i.e. "Han gick och bröt benet". These
> constructions are known in the literature as "Pseudocoordinates" or
> "Fake Coordinates" and besides the two languages mentioned, they
> can be found in Danish, Norwegian, and Afrikaans, but not in Dutch  or
> German. Other than English, the verb "take" can replace "go", e.g.
> Swedish "Han tog och bröt benet".
>
> Do such constructions occur in the Slavic languages? I believe they do in
> Polish, e.g.
>
> ?Ona wzie,La och wLoz^yLa re,ke, do zimnej wody.
> She went and put her hand in the cold water.
>
> And I came across this possible Russian example on the mighty Google:
>
> A server (win 2000 pro) vzjal i umer.
> But the server went and died.
>
> John Dingley
>
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