25.4835, Review: Historical Linguistics: Matthews (2013)

Mon Dec 1 21:12:57 UTC 2014

LINGUIST List: Vol-25-4835. Mon Dec 01 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.4835, Review: Historical Linguistics: Matthews (2013)

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Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 16:11:44
From: Heather Smyser [heathersmyser at email.arizona.edu]
Subject: The Structure and Development of Russian

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-3474.html

AUTHOR: William Kleesman  Matthews
TITLE: The Structure and Development of Russian
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Heather Smyser, University of Arizona

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

First published in 1953 and now appearing in a contemporary reprint, Matthews’
“The Structure and Development of Russian”, a 225 page book including the
index, provides a broad overview of both synchronic (Part I) and diachronic
(Part II) views of the Russian language before providing excerpts of a variety
of texts (Part III) that trace the development of written Russian from the
11th century up until the time of original publication. The introduction in
Part 1 provides information on the orthography, sounds, and sentence structure
before going into more detail in subsequent sections. The chapter on sounds
first delves into the production of the five identified phonemic vowels and
how they vary with regard to stress before continuing with a discussion of
consonants and intonation patterns. Chapter II then discusses words in Russian
and how they are divided into different word classes before tackling each
class separately, treating in each class basic morphological concerns. The
next chapter introduces formal and semantic analysis of sentence structure and
uses both to analyze the most common sentence structure patterns in Russian.
Chapter V concludes Part I and introduces known dialects of Russian within the
territory of the country itself presents characteristic features of each. 

Part II provides a historical explanation of the development of Russian, with
Chapter VI describing how development from Proto Indo-European to Old Russian
might have occurred. This chapter also gives an introduction to the
reconstructed sounds of Old Russian and its morphology and syntax. Chapter VII
continues to trace this development by focusing on the 11th to 14th centuries;
it introduces texts believed to be written at this time and their respective
genres, which provide some clues on how the language was evolving. Chapter
VIII treats the rise of Moscow from the 15th to 17th centuries, texts written
during this period, and the evolution of the written language used. Chapters
IX-XI trace the development of the written literary language in the 18th,
19th, and 20th centuries, respectively. Finally, Part III is a collection of
excerpts in chronological order of written texts in Russian at its various
stages from the 11th century to the modern era with their translations in
English in a parallel format. The book also includes a bibliography arranged
by topic and an index of terms. 

EVALUATION

Apart from a few minor problems, Matthews’ “The Structure and Development of
Russian” is a timeless work that still serves as a useful reference to
scholars and others interested in the Russian language. While it does not go
into exhaustive detail in any of its chapters, each section is a concise yet
complete overview of the aspect of the Russian language under review. The
bibliography lists the leading works of major theorists in all areas, covering
synchronic linguistics particularly well. While necessarily broad in order to
address both the structure and historical development of modern Russian, the
chapters are well developed without giving the impression that important
topics were glossed over. Indeed, the book makes for a quick, informative read
that does not suffer from disjointedness.

Matthews’ explanations of both synchronic and diachronic developments in
Russian are accessible to the majority of modern readers, although for those
not familiar with formal linguistics, descriptions of the verbal system might
prove challenging because they use terms like “aorist”, “focal”, and
“ablative”. Even so, the descriptions of both verbal aspect and the numerical
systems are particularly clear and concise; they would serve as excellent
resources to teachers of Russian at all levels, aiding them in developing
clearer explanations of the grammar for students. In particular, the
description of the verbal aspectual system and the illustrative chart provided
in Chapter III, part 7 could be incorporated into textbook descriptions of
grammar to clearly illustrate the encoding of aspect in Russian verbs and the
nuances of choosing one aspect over another. This section also could be useful
as a way to increase metalinguistic awareness in more advanced students, who
already have some understanding of the language’s structure. One minor problem
in Part I is the figure providing the waveforms of cardinal vowels (p. 23) as
none of the front vowel waveforms are labeled with their corresponding vowels,
leaving the reader to infer which waveform corresponds to which vowel. That
said, the discussion of vowel reduction depending on stress location and the
presentation of the corresponding allophones in stressed and unstressed
positions would benefit instructors wishing to improve students’ language
production, as long as they did not rely on the comparisons with vowels in
other languages in the description section. Although the comparisons
themselves are not flawed, few students today in the U.S. have sufficient
knowledge of Western European languages for the comparisons to be beneficial.

The synchronic section should also be of interest to sociolinguists and
anthropological linguists, as it provides a basis for comparison not only of
the standard literary language but also of dialects within the Russian
territory at the time of the book’s publication. The dialects of Russian,
their distribution, and their characteristic phonological features are not
topics often treated in Russian courses, yet researchers should be aware of
these dialects and the phonological, morphological, and syntactic features
that make them unique. Unfortunately, this section only briefly surveys
morphological variation among the dialects; it would have benefitted from
inclusion of a description of the morphological and syntactic variants that
mark a dialect as being North, Central, or South Russian. Additionally, no
mention is made of the dialects of Russian spoken within the satellite states
of the U.S.S.R. or even of the far eastern varieties. Such a discussion could
have served as a basis for a modern study of  how use of Russian in these
regions has changed with the fall of the U.S.S.R and the rise of national
identities.

Given  the rise of national identities after the fall of the Soviet Union, the
most glaring weakness of the work is the retention of dated terms with no
editorial explanation or mention of  the terminology currently accepted in the
field. In the first part, for example, “White Russia” is used for “Belarus”;
while historically accurate, the  term raises the concern of identity,
colonialism, and politics. The use of the term “Old Russian” in Part II to
describe the language used in texts dating from the 11th century is also
problematic in that it implies that the language of these texts is
differentiated from Old Ukrainian and Old Belarusian, when in fact one can
easily argue that it is not and instead that one can see aspects of Eastern
Slavic languages present in these early examples. Schenker (1995) opts for the
more politically correct term by identifying the language in question as East
Slavic, which was distinct from West and South Slavic.

Although approximate dates are provided for the excerpts in Part III, the
location where the manuscript was found as well as a discussion of traits that
were hallmarks of East Slavic would have lent more credence to including these
as older forms along a continuum of development towards modern Russian.
Presented as they are, one gets the impression that all of these texts are
distinctly Russian in nature even though some of the earlier ones might adhere
more closely to official Church Slavic forms. Some indication of East Slavic
and Russian features in each text would have been useful, especially for those
who have never before seen old East Slavic texts. Also, although English
glosses are present for each of the old texts, a glossary of Old Russian to
Modern Russian and a chart detailing modern equivalents for letters no longer
in use would have been extremely beneficial since this would more clearly
demonstrate the evolution of the language. Comprehension of earlier texts
might prove problematic unless one is already familiar with these changes.
That said, the texts do appear to have been carefully chosen, and the reader
with advanced proficiency in modern Russian should be able to decode their
basic meaning, particularly that of later texts, with the assistance of the
changes referenced in Part II. 

Even with these relatively small issues, the work serves as a comprehensible
and succinct introduction to both contemporary and historical Russian
linguistics; and the information it presents is still relevant to a modern
understanding of the structure and development of  the Russian language. his
work would be of great value to graduate students preparing for traditional
exams in Russian linguistics as its compact summaries are enough to prompt
recall of more detailed information. It should also serve as a reference text
for modern studies of Russian dialect variation, allowing modern scholars to
ascertain how the dialectal situation has changed since the 1950s by providing
a snapshot of Russian as it was used at the time of publication.  Finally, in
terms of historical linguistic inquiry, this work should spur more research on
the development of the Russian lexicon from the earliest texts to the modern
era to better understand diachronic developments in the language. 

REFERENCES

Schenker, A. M. (1995). The Dawn of Slavic: An introduction to Slavic
Philology. New Haven: Yale University Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Heather Smyser is currently a graduate student in Second Language Acquisition
and Teaching at the University of Arizona. Current research is investigating
ties between the L2 and L3 in the multilingual lexicon through masked priming
to determine the relationship between these and lexical access. Previous and
secondary research includes lexical and syntactic influence of French on 18th
century Russian, particularly in the works of Karamzin through an analysis of
his use of calques in the povest' Bednaya Liza and their relation to French
sentimentalism.

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