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Article on D. Pesetsky’s grammar theories | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Русский |  | |
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4624 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 9 of 12 10 February 2014 at 6:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I must also say I really don't understand what he means. Maybe it is better explained in his book, but this particular example doesn't make sense to me. What does he mean by saying that "beautiful" and "tables" remain genitive? In my view, the noun, in a language where the noun declines, doesn't remain anything. Yes, grammatical convention has it that the "basic form" is the nominative, but that doesn't mean that nominative is another name for noun. So his statement that “A noun assigns genitive because genitive is just another name for noun" is, to be frank, mere nonsense IMHO. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4757 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 10 of 12 10 February 2014 at 6:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Probably off-topic, but Cabaire's post sent me on a bit of a tangent. I'll get the boring nitpicky stuff out of the way first: -стол doesn't mean "stool", and neither does стул. The former translates to "table" or "desk", while the latter translates to "chair". "Stool" is табурет(ка). -эти последние пять красивых столов -эти пять последних красивых столов But the thing that struck me the most is how the difference in meaning between the two sentences really doesn't seem all that self-evident to me. When I first read the two sentences I thought of them as completely interchangeable (and equally ambiguous). After reading each sentence out loud about ten times I felt I was ready to say that you got things backwards - it's the first one that states that no other tables are left, while the latter implies that there are other, uglier ones. After reading them more slowly another ten times I was starting to come round to your point of view, but then I tried putting more emphasis on a different word each time and it all went to hell. But then, for all I know your translations could be 100% correct and logical from the point of view of prescriptive standard Russian, as opposed to my personal idiolect. Edited by vonPeterhof on 10 February 2014 at 6:35pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5584 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 11 of 12 10 February 2014 at 10:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well, I would not give that translation the shirt off my back, I only suppose there are shades of meaning. I can be totally wrong, naturally...
PS. Damned be false friends. I suppose, стол и стул are among the first nouns I was taught in Russian, and I got them wrong :-( And the soft and hard endings of my adjectives need a revision too. Thanks, vonPeterhof! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5213 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 12 of 12 10 February 2014 at 11:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I've since read some of Pesetsky's criticism of Everett's work. Perhaps he's wrong, but he's certainly not a crackpot. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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