User:Helrasincke/Morphology/Russian

This is a draft for an appendix which deals with the system of morphological analysis for the Russian language known as the single-stem system which was developed by Roman Jakobsen and built upon by Charles E. Townsend, Charles Gribble and others. For an overview based on the more traditional two-stem anlysis, see instead Appendix:Russian verbs.

For some verbs this process can be hard to see because the consonant mutation only occurs across the word-family. Consonants г, к, х, ск and ц mutate before the verbal stems -и- and -е-, for example:

The motion verb pair таскать, таскаю, таскают vs. тащить, тащу, тащут (analysable as таск и -tʹ, таск-и -u, таск и -ut),^[1] c.f. таскивать

Restricted to a small number of verbs and certain noun - adjective pairings

Russian roots by their nature consonantal (that is, ending in a consonant) and may form words by combination with prefixes or suffixes (which include the various class of zero suffix) as well as the inflectional endings. Roots are theoretical forms, that is they never appear on their own (and any case where they do can be formally analysed as including a)

Stems on the other hand may be either consonantal or non-consonantal (ending in a vowel). Stems consist of a root which imparts the basic meaning and may be suffixed by a verbal stem. According to the single-stem system of analysis, almost all Russian verbs can be divided into two broad classes:

• Nonsuffixed stems, which combine directly with the inflectional ending. They are all consonant stems and can be further classified according to final consonant type (obstruent, syllabic or non-syllabic resonant stems).
• Suffixed stems, which contain one or more derivational suffixes between the root and the inflectional ending. These stems can be further divided into:
  • consonant stems (all with final suffixes ending in the palatal consonant -й);
  • vowel stems (this group also includes all suffixes forming verbs which would traditionally be described as belonging to the second conjugation: suffixes: И, Е and ЖА, with Ж representing any palatal consonant: Ш Ж Щ Ч as well as Й.

The basic form, from which the root can be clearly identified and all other forms including can be derived is for all consonant stems the third person plural, while for vowel stems the infinitive serves as the basic form. This is because of the truncation rules described above.

The exceptions number under thirty, the vast majority of which fit into one of the regular classes with only minor irregularities. The only two truly anomalous stems under this system: дад-ут (give) and ед-ят (eat), which nonetheless share many similarities with one another.

• Gary, Browing, David K. Hart, Raisa Solovyova (2001) Leveraging Your Russian With Roots, Prefixes, And Suffixes, Bloomington, IN: Slavica, →ISBN
• Channon, Robert (1975) “The Single-Stem Verb System Revisited”, in The Slavic and East European Journal, volume 19, number 1, →JSTOR, pages 112-122
• Gribble, Charles (1982) Russian Root List With a Sketch of Word-Formation, Columbus, OH: Slavica, →ISBN
• Jakobson, Roman (1948) “Russian Conjugation”, in WORD, volume 4, number 3, →DOI, pages 155-167
• Tixonov, Aleksandr Nikolajevič (2014) Новый словообразовательный словарь, Moscow: АСТ, →ISBN
• Townsend, Charles (1968) Russian Word Formation, Columbus, OH: Slavica, →ISBN