Grammatical/Phraseological Query

[Alina Israeli]

>To add to the Lahti/Vanchu debate:
>
>When I was being taught Russian (in the British army, eons ago) I remember
>being told that a good way to understand the use of *v* plus the nominative
>of persons, as in
>
>idti v gosti
>
>is to use this construction when *v* means "among" rather than "into". This
>will 'work' for the examples cited so far, all of which involve
>professions.
>Perhaps a context can be devised where
>
>idti v gostej
>
>would be appropriate - something physically penetrating the guests?

No, penetrating is not a good metaphor.
"among" is indeed a good idea.

About 20 years ago Mel'chuk published an article about it in Russian
Linguistics. Everything is good, except it should not be called Nominative.

We have Genitive-2, and Locative/Prepositional-2, we can live with
Accusative-2. There is no need to wreck the syntactic system of the
language: Nominative is the case of the expressed grammatical subject.

This construction means 'joining the ranks of' intransitively or
'taking/leading into the ranks of' transitively:

idti v soldaty
naprashivat'sja v druz'ja
gotovit'sja v uchitelja
vyjti v ljudi
metit' v generaly
prosit'sja v storozha

otpravit' v soldaty
vyvesti v ljudi

and many others.

"Ja by v letchiki poshel, pust' menja nauchat"

There a few nouns that have the same function:

kandidat v prezidenty
vybory v prezidenty
priem v pionery etc.

**************************************************************
Alina Israeli
LFS, American University                phone:  (202) 885-2387
4400 Mass. Ave., NW                     fax:    (202) 885-1076
Washington, DC 20016

aisrael at american.edu

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                http://members.home.net/lists/seelangs/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------