The Syntax of Russian Cambridge Syntax Guides Series

The study of Russian is of great importance to syntactic theory, due in particular to its unusual case system and its complex word order patterns. This book provides an essential guide to Russian syntax and examines the major syntactic structures of the language. It begins with an overview of verbal and nominal constituents, followed by major clause types, including null-copular and impersonal sentences, WH-questions and their distribution, and relative and subordinate clauses. The syntax behind the rich Russian morphological case system is then described in detail, with focus on both the fairly standard instances of Nominative, Accusative and Dative case as well as the important language-specific uses of the Genitive and Instrumental cases. The book goes on to analyze the syntax of 'free' word order for which Russian is famous. It will be of interest to researchers and students of syntactic theory, of Slavic linguistics and of language typology.

Part I. Basic Configurations: 1. Verbal phrases; 2. Nominal phrases; 3. Types of clauses; Part II. Case: 4. Core cases of Russian case; 5. More cases of Russian case: predicate instrumental, quantificational genitive and others…; Part III. Word Order: 6. A descriptive overview of Russian word order; 7. Theoretical issues in Russian word order.

John Frederick Bailyn is Professor of Linguistics at Stony Brook University. He is the author of numerous articles and edited volumes on formal Slavic linguistics especially in the areas of case, word order, functional categories, syntactic microvariation and binding.