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Russian Language Journal

Author ORCID Identifier

ORCID: 0000-0003-1308-3506

Keywords

Russian, motion verb, secondary predicate, corpus linguisti

Abstract

The Russian secondary predication construction in (1) and (2) has received considerable attention in theoretical linguistics but has been less prominent in the pedagogical literature on motion verbs. This lack of prominence in the pedagogical literature is regrettable since verbs of motion figure prominently in the construction and since the construction represents an important challenge for second language (L2) learners of Russian:

(1) Ты сюда зачем пьяный пришел? (Андрей Житков. Супермаркет, 2000)

(2) Первым на обсуждение был вынесен проект постановления «О поддержке курса Украины на интеграцию в Европейский союз» авторства Арсения Яценюка. (Ольга Куришко. В большинстве своем // Коммерсант, 14.01.2013)

The construction involves a full verb (e.g., прийти ‘come’ and вынести ‘carry out’) and a secondary predicate (e.g., пьяный ‘drunk’ and первый ‘first’) in the nominative or instrumental case. The present study addresses six research questions: Which case does the secondary predicate occur in—nominative or instrumental? Has the construction changed over time? Which verbs combine with secondary predicates? Are both aspects frequently used? What is the typical word order? What are the implications for classroom practice? Taking advantage of the recently added syntactic annotation to the Russian National Corpus (main and newspaper subcorpora), the present study analyzes a database of approximately 850 authentic examples. I argue that Contemporary Standard Russian has two semantically distinct subconstructions of the secondary predication construction. I discuss some changes over time and show how the idea of “strategic input” can inform the teaching of motion verbs and secondary predicates in L2 Russian.

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