Russian grammar employs an Indo-European inflexional structure, with considerable adaptation.
Russian has a highly inflectional morphology, particularly in nominals (nouns, pronouns, adjectives and numerals). Russian literary syntax is a combination of a Church Slavonic heritage, a variety of loaned and adopted constructs, and a standardized vernacular foundation.
The spoken language has been influenced by the literary one, with some additional characteristic forms. Russian dialects show various non-standard grammatical features, some of which are archaisms or descendants of old forms discarded by the literary language.
Various terms are used to describe Russian grammar with the meaning they have in standard Russian discussions of historical grammar, as opposed to the meaning they have in descriptions of the English language; in particular, aorist, imperfect, etc., are considered verbal tenses, rather than aspects, because ancient examples of them are attested for both perfective and imperfective verbs. Russian also places the accusative case between the dative and the instrumental, and in the tables below, the accusative case appears between the nominative and genitive cases.
Nominal declension involves six main cases – nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and prepositional – in two numbers (singular and plural), and grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter). Up to ten additional cases are identified in linguistics textbooks,[1][2][3] although all of them are either incomplete (do not apply to all nouns) or degenerate (appear identical to one of the six main cases) – the most recognized additional cases are locative, partitive and vocative. Old Russian also had a third number, the dual, but it has been lost except for its use in the nominative and accusative cases with the numbers 1½, 2, 3 and 4 (e.g. полтора часа "an hour and a half", два стула "two chairs"), where it is now reanalyzed as genitive singular.
Russian has some nouns that only appear in the singular form (singulare tantum), for example: малина, природа; also, approximatеly 600 words appear only in the plural form (plurale tantum): деньги, ножницы.[4]
More often than in many other Indo-European languages, Russian noun cases may supplant the use of prepositions entirely.[5] Furthermore, every preposition is exclusively used with a particular case (or cases). Their usage can be summarised as:[6]
Definite and indefinite articles (corresponding to 'the', 'a', 'an' in English) do not exist in the Russian language. The sense conveyed by such articles can be determined in Russian by context. However, Russian also utilizes other means of expressing whether a noun is definite or indefinite:
The category of animacy is relevant in Russian nominal and adjectival declension.[8] Specifically, the accusative has two possible forms in many paradigms, depending on the animacy of the referent. For animate referents (persons and animals), the accusative form is generally identical to the genitive form. For inanimate referents, the accusative form is identical to the nominative form. This principle is relevant for masculine singular nouns of the second declension (see below) and adjectives, and for all plural paradigms (with no gender distinction). In the tables below, this behavior is indicated by the abbreviation 'N or G' in the row corresponding to the accusative case.
Russian uses three declensions:[9]
A group of irregular "different-declension nouns" (Russian: разносклоняемые существительные), consists of a few neuter nouns ending in -мя (e.g. время "time") and one masculine noun путь "way". However, these nouns and their forms have sufficient similarity with feminine third declension nouns that scholars such as Litnevskaya[10] consider them to be non-feminine forms of this declension.
Nouns ending with -ий, -ия, -ие (not to be confused with nominalized adjectives) are written with -ии instead of -ие in prepositional (as this ending is never stressed, there is no difference in pronunciation): тече́ние – в ни́жнем тече́нии реки́ "streaming – in lower streaming of a river". However, if words в течение and в продолжение represent a compound preposition meaning – "while, during the time of" – they are written with -е: в тече́ние ча́са "in a time of an hour". For nouns ending in -ья, -ье, or -ьё, using -ьи in the prepositional (where endings of some of them are stressed) is usually erroneous, but in poetic speech it may be acceptable (as we replace -ии with -ьи for metric or rhyming purposes): Весь день она́ лежа́ла в забытьи́ (Fyodor Tyutchev).
Some singular nouns denoting groups of people may include the -ин- suffix before ending.
Some nouns (such as borrowings from other languages, abbreviations, etc.) are not modified when they change number and case. This occurs especially when the ending appears not to match any declension pattern in the appropriate gender. An example of an indeclinable noun is кофе ("coffee").
Some nouns use several additional cases. The most important of these are:
A Russian adjective (и́мя прилага́тельное) is usually placed before the noun it qualifies, and it agrees with the noun in case, gender, and number. With the exception of a few invariant forms borrowed from other languages, such as беж ('beige', non-adapted form of бе́жевый) or ха́ки ('khaki-colored'), most adjectives follow one of a small number of regular declension patterns (except for some that complicate the short form). In modern Russian, the short form appears only in the nominative and is used when the adjective is in a predicative role: нов, нова́, нóво, новы́ are short forms of но́вый ('new'). Formerly (as in the bylinas) short adjectives appeared in all other forms and roles, which are not used in the modern language, but are nonetheless understandable to Russian speakers as they are declined exactly like nouns of the corresponding gender.[11]
Adjectives may be divided into three general groups:
The pattern described below holds true for full forms of most adjectives, except possessive ones. It is also used for substantivized adjectives as учёный ("scientist, scholar" as a noun substitute or "scientific, learned" as a general adjective) and for adjectival participles. Russian differentiates between hard-stem and soft-stem adjectives, shown before and after a slash sign.
Comparison forms are usual only for qualitative adjectives and adverbs. Comparative and superlative synthetic forms are not part of the paradigm of original adjective but are different lexical items, since not all qualitative adjectives have them. A few adjectives have irregular forms that are declined as usual adjectives: большо́й 'big' – бо́льший 'bigger', хоро́ший 'good' – лу́чший 'better'. Most synthetically-derived comparative forms are derived by adding the suffix -е́е or -е́й to the adjective stem: кра́сный 'red' – красне́е 'redder'; these forms are difficult to distinguish from adverbs, whose comparative forms often coincide with those of their adjectival counterparts.[11] Superlative synthetic forms are derived by adding the suffix -е́йш- or -а́йш- and additionally sometimes the prefix наи-, or using a special comparative form with the prefix наи-: до́брый 'kind' – добре́йший 'the kindest', большо́й 'big' – наибо́льший 'the biggest'.
An alternative is to add an adverb to the positive form of the adjective. The adverbs used for this are бо́лее 'more' / ме́нее 'less' and са́мый 'most' / наибо́лее 'most' / наиме́нее 'least': for example, до́брый 'kind' – бо́лее до́брый 'kinder' – са́мый до́брый 'the kindest'. This way is rarely used if special comparative forms exist.
Possessive adjectives are less frequently used in Russian than in most other Slavic languages,[12] but are in use. They respond to the questions чей? чья? чьё? чьи? (whose?) and denote only animate possessors. See section below.
If the preposition "about" is used (usually о), for singular demonstrative pronouns (as with any other words starting with a vowel) it is об: об э́том – about this.
Unlike English, Russian uses the same form for a possessive adjective and the corresponding possessive pronoun. In Russian grammar they are called possessive pronouns притяжательные местоимения (compare with possessive adjectives like Peter's = Петин above). The following rules apply:
The ending -его is pronounced as -ево́.
These interrogatives are used by scholars to denote "usual" questions for correspondent grammatical cases (prepositional is used with о): (кто?) Ма́ша лю́бит (кого?) Ва́сю – (who?) Masha [N.] loves (whom?) Vasya [G.].
The ending "-его" is pronounced as "-ево".
Russian has several classes of numerals ([имена] числительные): cardinal, ordinal, collective, and also fractional constructions; also it has other types of words, relative to numbers: collective adverbial forms (вдвоём), multiplicative (двойной) and counting-system (двоичный) adjectives, some numeric-pronominal and indefinite quantity words (сколько, много, несколько). Here are the numerals from 0 to 10:
Grammatical conjugation is subject to three persons in two numbers and two simple tenses (present/future and past), with periphrastic forms for the future and subjunctive, as well as imperative forms and present/past participles, distinguished by adjectival and adverbial usage (see adjectival participle and adverbial participle). Verbs and participles can be reflexive, i.e. have reflexive suffix -ся/-сь appended after ending.
The past tense is made to agree in gender with the subject, for it is the participle in an originally periphrastic perfect formed (like the perfect passive tense in Latin) with the present tense of the verb "to be" быть [bɨtʲ], which is now omitted except for rare archaic effect, usually in set phrases (откуда есть пошла земля русская [ɐtˈkudə jesʲtʲ pɐˈʂla zʲɪˈmlʲa ˈruskəjə], "whence is come the Russian land", the opening of the Primary Chronicle in modern spelling). The participle nature of past-tense forms is exposed also in that they often have an extra suffix vowel, which is absent in present/future; the same vowel appears in infinitive form, which is considered by few scholars not to be verbal (and in the past it surely used to be a noun), but in which verbs appear in most dictionaries: ходить "to walk" – ходил "(he) walked" – хожу "I walk".
Verbal inflection is considerably simpler than in Old Russian. The ancient aorist, imperfect, and (periphrastic) pluperfect have been lost, though the aorist sporadically occurs in secular literature as late as the second half of the eighteenth century, and survives as an odd form in direct narration (а он пойди да скажи [ɐ on pɐjˈdʲi də skɐˈʐɨ], etc., exactly equivalent to the English colloquial "so he goes and says"), recategorized as a usage of the imperative. The loss of three of the former six tenses has been offset by the development, as in other Slavic languages, of verbal aspect (вид). Most verbs come in pairs, one with imperfective (несоверше́нный вид) or continuous, the other with perfective (соверше́нный вид) or completed aspect, usually formed with a (prepositional) prefix, but occasionally using a different root. E.g., спать [spatʲ] ('to sleep') is imperfective; поспать [pɐˈspatʲ] ('to take a nap') is perfective.
The present tense of the verb быть is today normally used only in the third-person singular form, есть, which is often used for all the persons and numbers.[14] As late as the nineteenth century, the full conjugation, which today is extremely archaic, was somewhat more natural: forms occur in the Synodal Bible, in Dostoevsky and in the bylinas (былины [bɨˈlʲinɨ]) or oral folk-epics, which were transcribed at that time. The paradigm shows as well as anything else the Indo-European affinity of Russian:
The infinitive is the basic form of a verb for most purposes of study. In Russian it has the suffix -ть/-ти (the latter is used after consonants), or ends with -чь (but -чь is not a suffix of a verb)[clarification needed]. For reflexive verbs -ся/-сь suffix is added in the end. Note that due to phonological effects, both -ться and -тся endings (latter is used for present-future tense of a 3rd person reflexive verb; see below) are pronounced as [t͡sə] or [tsə] and often cause misspellings even among native speakers.
Future tense has two forms: simple and compound.
Two forms are used to conjugate the present tense of imperfective verbs and the future tense of perfective verbs.
The first conjugation is used in verb stems ending in:
The second conjugation involves verb stems ending in:
Example: попро-с-ить – попро-ш-у, попро-с-ят [pəprɐˈsʲitʲ, pəprɐˈʂu, pɐˈprosʲɪt] (to have solicited – [I, they] will have solicited).
There are five irregular verbs:
The Russian past tense is gender specific: –л for masculine singular subjects, –ла for feminine singular subjects, –ло for neuter singular subjects, and –ли for plural subjects. This gender specificity applies to all persons; thus, to say "I slept", a male speaker would say я спал, while a female speaker would say я спалá.
Russian verbs can form three moods (наклонения): indicative (изъявительное), conditional (сослагательное) and imperative (повелительное).[15]
The imperative mood second-person singular is formed from the future-present base of most verbs by adding -и (stressed ending in present-future, or if base ends on more than one consonant), -ь (unstressed ending, base on one consonant) or -й (unstressed ending, base on vowel). Plural (including polite на вы) second-person form is made by adding -те to singular one: говорю 'I speak' – говори – говорите, забуду 'I shall forget' – забудь – забудьте, клею 'I glue' – клей – клейте. Some perfective verbs have first-person plural imperative form with -те added to similar simple future or present tense form: пойдёмте 'let us go'. Other forms can express command in Russian; for third person, for example, пусть particle with future can be used: Пусть они замолчат! 'Let them shut up!'.[16]
The conditional mood in Russian is formed by adding the particle бы after the word which marks the supposed subject into a sentence formed like in the past tense. Thus, to say "I would (hypothetically) sleep" or "I would like to sleep", a male speaker would say я спал бы (or я бы поспа́л), while a female speaker would say я спалá бы (or я бы поспала́).
Verbs of motion are a distinct class of verbs found in several Slavic languages. Due to the extensive semantic information they contain, Russian verbs of motion pose difficulties for non-native learners at all levels of study.[17] Unprefixed verbs of motion, which are all imperfective, divide into pairs based on the direction of the movement (uni- or multidirectional — sometimes referred to as determinate/indeterminate or definite/indefinite). As opposed to a verb-framed language, in which path is encoded in the verb, but manner of motion typically is expressed with complements, Russian is a satellite language, meaning that these concepts are encoded in both the root of the verb and the particles associated with it, satellites.[18] Thus, the roots of motion verbs convey the lexical information of manner of movement, e.g. walking, crawling, running, whereas prefixes denote path, e.g. motion in and out of space.[19][note 1] The roots also distinguish between means of conveyance, e.g. by transport or by one's own power, and in transitive verbs, the object or person being transported.[20] The information below provides an outline of the formation and basic usage of unprefixed and prefixed verbs of motion.
Unidirectional verbs describe motion in progress in one direction, e.g.:
Multidirectional verbs describe:
The addition of the prefix по- to a unidirectional verb of motion makes the verb perfective, denoting the beginning of a movement, i.e. 'setting out'. These perfectives imply that the agent has not yet returned at the moment of speech, e.g.,[21]: 353–355
Three pairs of motion verbs generally refer to 'taking', 'leading' with additional lexical information on manner of motion and object of transport encoded in the verb stem. These are нести/носить, вести/водить, and везти/возить. See below for the specific information on manner and object of transport:[21]
Motion verbs combine with prefixes to form new aspectual pairs, which lose the distinction of directionality, but gain spatial or temporal meanings. The unidirectional verb serves as the base for the perfective, and the multidirectional as the base for the imperfective. In addition to the meanings conveyed by the prefix and the simplex motion verb, prepositional phrases also contribute to the expression of path in Russian.[22] Thus, it is important to consider the whole verb phrase when examining verbs of motion.
In some verbs of motion, adding a prefix requires a different stem shape:[23]
See below for a table the prefixes, their primary meanings, and the prepositions that accompany them, adapted from Muravyova.[20] Several examples are taken directly or modified from Muravyova.
The uni- and multidirectional distinction rarely figures into the metaphorical and idiomatic use of motion verbs, because such phrases typically call for one or the other verb. See below for examples:[21]: 357–358
Russian adjectival participles can be active or passive; have perfective or imperfective aspect; imperfective participles can have present or past tense, while perfective ones in classical language can be only past.[24] As adjectives, they are declined by case, number and gender. If adjectival participles are derived from reciprocal verbs, they have suffix -ся appended after the adjectival ending; this suffix in participles never takes the short form. Participles are often difficult to distinguish from deverbal adjectives (this is important for some cases of orthography).
Лю́ди, живу́щие в э́том го́роде, о́чень до́брые и отве́тственные – The people living in this city are very kind and responsible.
In order to form the active present participle, the "т" of the 3rd person plural of the present tense is replaced by "щ", and a necessary adjective ending is added:
Note: Only imperfective verbs can have an active present participle.
(*) Note: These forms are obsolete in modern Russian and they are not used in the spoken language as forms of the verb 'to be'.
The participle agrees in gender, case and number with the word it refers to:
The active past participle is used in order to indicate actions that happened in the past:
Compare:
In order to form the active past participle, the infinitive ending '-ть' is replaced by the suffix '-вш-' and add an adjective ending:
In order to form the passive present participle it is necessary to add an adjective ending to the 1st person plural of the present tense:
Passive participles are occasional in modern Russian. Often, same meaning is conveyed by reflexive active present participles:
The forms ending in -омый are mostly obsolete. Only the forms ведо́мый (from вести́ – to lead) and иско́мый (from иска́ть – to search, to look for) are used in the spoken language as adjectives:
Passive past participles are formed by means of the suffixes '-нн-' or '-т-' from the infinitive stem of perfective verbs. Besides that, this kind of participle can have short forms formed by means of the suffixes '-н-' or '-т-':
Adverbial participles (деепричастия) express an earlier or simultaneous action providing context for the sentence in which they occur, similar to the English constructions "having done X" or "while doing Y".
Like normal adverbs, adverbial participles are not declined. They inherit the aspect of their verb; imperfective ones are usually present, while perfective ones can only be past (since they denote action performed by the subject, the tense corresponds to the time of action denoted by the verb). Adverbial participles are usually active, but passive constructions may be formed using adverbial participle forms of the verb быть (present будучи "being", very rarely past бывши "having been"); these may be combined with either an adjectival participle in the instrumental case (Будучи раненным, боец оставался в строю – Being wounded, the combatant remained in the row), or a short adjective in the nominative (Бывши один раз наказан, он больше так не делал – Having been punished once, he didn't do it any more).
Present adverbial participles are formed by adding the suffix -а/-я (or sometimes -учи/-ючи, which is usually deprecated) to the stem of the present tense. A few past adverbial participles (mainly of intransitive verbs of motion) are formed in the same way, but most are formed with the suffix -в (alternative form -вши, always used before -сь), some whose stem ends with a consonant, with -ши. For reflexive verbs, the suffix -сь remains at the very end of the word; in poetry it can take the form -ся.[25][26]
In standard Russian, adverbial participles are considered a feature of bookish speech; in colloquial language they are usually replaced with single adjectival participles or constructions with verbs: Пообедав, я пошёл гулять ("Having eaten, I went for a walk") → Я пообедал и пошёл гулять ("I ate and went for a walk"). But in some conservative dialects, adverbial and adjectival participles may be used to produce perfect forms, which do not occur in standard Russian; e.g. "I haven't eaten today" will be "Я сегодня не евши" instead of "Я сегодня не ел".
1These verbs all have a stem change.
2These verbs are palatalised in certain cases, namely с → ш for all the present forms of "писа́ть", and д → ж in the first person singular of the other verbs.
3These verbs do not conform to either the first or second conjugations.
Russian has on hand a set of prefixes, prepositional and adverbial in nature, as well as diminutive, augmentative, and frequentative suffixes. All of these can be stacked one upon the other to produce multiple derivatives of a given word. Participles and other inflectional forms may also have a special connotation. For example:
Russian has also proven friendly to long compounds. As an extreme case:
Purists (as Dmitry Ushakov in the preface to his dictionary) frown on such words. Some linguists[which?] have suggested that Russian compounding stems from Church Slavonic. In the twentieth century, abbreviated components frequently appeared in compounds:
Basic word order, both in conversation and written language, is subject–verb–object. However, because grammatical relationships are marked by inflection, considerable latitude in word order is allowed, and all possible permutations can be used. For example, the words in the phrase "я пошёл в магазин" ('I went to the shop') can be arranged:
while maintaining grammatical correctness. Note, however, that the order of the phrase "в магазин" ("to the shop") is kept constant.
Word order can express logical stress, and degree of definiteness. The primary emphasis tends to be initial, with a weaker emphasis at the end. Some of these arrangements can describe present actions, not only past (despite the fact that the verb пошёл is in the past).
In some cases, alternative word order can change the meaning entirely:
Russian is a null-subject language – it allows constructing sentences without subject (Russian: безличные предложения). Some of them are claimed to not be impersonal, but to have oblique subject. One possible classification of such sentences distinguishes:[28]
Unlike in standard English, multiple negatives are compulsory in Russian, as in "никто никогда никому ничего не прощает" [nʲɪkˈto nʲɪkɐɡˈda nʲɪkɐˈmu nʲɪtɕɪˈvo nʲɪ prɐɕˈɕæjɪt] ('No-one ever forgives anyone for anything' literally, "no one never to no-one nothing does not forgive"). Usually, only one word in a sentence has negative particle or prefix "не" or belongs to negative word "нет", while another word has negation-affirmative particle or prefix "ни"; but this word can often be omitted, and thus ни becomes the signal of negation: вокруг никого нет and вокруг никого both mean "there is nobody around".
As a one-word answer to an affirmative sentence, yes translates да and no translates нет, as shown by the table below. [citation needed]
No simple rule supplies an adverbial answer to a negative sentence. B. Comrie[29] says that in Russian answer да or нет is determined not so much by the negative form of the question as by the questioner's intent for using negation, or whether the response is in agreement with his presupposition. In many cases that means that the adverbial answer should be extended for avoiding ambiguity; in spoken language, intonation in saying нет can also be significant to if it is affirmation of negation or negation of negation.
Note that while expressing an affirmation of negation by extending "да" with a negated verb is grammatically acceptable. In practice it is more common to answer "нет" and subsequently extend with a negated verb paralleling the usage in English. Answering a negative sentence with a non-extended "нет" is usually interpreted as an affirmation of negation again in a way similar to English.
Alternatively, both positive and negative simple questions can be answered by repeating the predicate with or without не, especially if да/нет is ambiguous: in the latest example, "сержусь" or "не сержусь".
The most common types of coordination expressed by compound sentences in Russian are conjoining, oppositional, and separative. Additionally, the Russian grammar considers comparative, complemental, and clarifying. Other flavors of meaning may also be distinguished.
Conjoining coordinations are formed with the help of the conjunctions и "and", ни … ни ("not … not" — simultaneous negation), та́кже "also", то́же ("too"; the latter two have complementary flavors), etc. Most commonly the conjoining coordination expresses enumeration, simultaneity or immediate sequence. They may also have a cause-effect flavor.
Oppositional coordinations are formed with the help of the oppositional conjunctions: а "and"~"but", но "but", одна́ко "however", зато́ "on the other hand", же "and"~"but", etc. They express the semantic relations of opposition, comparison, incompatibility, restriction, or compensation.
Separative coordinations are formed with the help of the separative conjunctions: и́ли "or", ли́бо "either", ли … ли "whether … or", то … то "then … then", etc. They express alternation or incompatibility of things expressed in the coordinated sentences.
Complemental and clarifying coordination expresses additional, but not subordinated, information related to the first sentence.
Comparative coordination is a semantic flavor of the oppositional one.
Common coordinating conjunctions include:
The distinction between "и" and "а" is important:
The distinction between "и" and "а" developed after medieval times. Originally, "и" and "а" were closer in meaning. The unpunctuated ending of the Song of Igor illustrates the potential confusion. The final five words in modern spelling, "князьям слава а дружине аминь" [knʲɪˈzʲjam ˈslavə ɐ druˈʐɨnʲɪ ɐˈmʲinʲ] can be understood either as "Glory to the princes and to their retinue! Amen." or "Glory to the princes, and amen (R.I.P.) to their retinue". Although the majority opinion is definitely with the first interpretation, no consensus has formed. The psychological difference between the two is quite obvious.
Complementizers (subordinating conjunctions, adverbs, or adverbial phrases) include:
In general, Russian has fewer subordinate clauses than English, because the participles and adverbial participles often take the place of a relative pronoun/verb combination. For example:
Despite the inflectional nature of Russian, there is no equivalent in modern Russian to the English nominative absolute or the Latin ablative absolute construction. The old language had an absolute construction, with the noun in the dative. Like so many other archaisms, it is retained in Church Slavonic. Among the last known examples in literary Russian occurs in Radishchev's Journey from Petersburg to Moscow (Путешествие из Петербурга в Москву [pʊtʲɪˈʂɛstvʲɪje ɪs pʲɪtʲɪrˈburɡə v mɐˈskvu]), 1790:
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