HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

UKRAINIAN-RUSSIAN COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR 535authors do not state that polarization for gender is as natural for parts of the day orseasons as it is for kinship terms, there is no reason for them to present the former aspairs. This is another example of a partial truth: these words do have gender, but sodo all nouns, and the use of this example can only lead readers to draw inaccurategeneralizations. Furthermore, the authors ignore interesting points of real comparison,such as the feminine Ukrainian words nioflHHa 'person' andnHTHHa 'child',which are quite odd from a Russian perspective (cf. Russian masculine lejioBeK andpeSeHOK).Declension paradigms are discussed in traditional terms, so that Ukrainian hasfour substantival paradigms and Russian has three. While this is a useful approachfor students who will use reference grammars organized according to these terms, itwould have been desirable to mention that Ukrainian IM'H represents a fourthdeclension while Russian HMH does not only because of the decisions of grammarians.To be sure, the Ukrainian fourth declension embraces more words than thecorresponding Russian paradigm, but this is beside the point: whether IM'SLrepresents a separate declensional paradigm is not a fact of the language, but a constructof analysis.The morphology section is riddled with primitive mistakes, which can be dividedinto errors of fact and errors of interpretation. Examples of errors of fact include thefollowing. Contrary to the statement on pages 106-107, the dative and locative a-stem desinence -H has not been eliminated from Russian (e.g., apMHH), although itsdistribution is not as wide as in earlier stages of the language and it can be interpretedas an arbitrary spelling of unstressed /e/. The authors omit entirely the Russiano-stem locative desinence -H (reman, 3flaHHn; p. 115). The locative desinence -ydoes not occur with nouns that have end stress (see p. 115); rather, this desinenceoccurs only with a limited number of primarily monosyllabic and pleophonic nounswith fixed stem stress in the singular. The authors are simply incorrect in callingRussian 6OTH a relic of the dual (p. 126); this historically masculine noun wouldhave had a dual form *6oTa, and the modern plural 6OTM cannot possible reflect adual. Indeed, this noun was surely borrowed after the loss of the dual in East Slavic.The discussion of the accusative plural of feminines states that all femininenouns in Russian use the genitive plural form as the accusative plural, "regardless ofwhether they represent people or animals" (p. 109), but this characterizes, ofcourse, only animate nouns; inanimate nouns in all three East Slavic languages usethe nominative plural form. In the discussion of pronouns, caM and caMHii aretreated as single lexeme (p. 137), although the uses and meanings of these two pronounsare quite different. The use of short adjectives in Russian should have beenexplained in more detail (pp. 146-47), since this is an important difference betweenUkrainian and Russian. Contracted long adjectives 4 do not occur in contemporarystandard Russian, although they are found in dialects, a few fixed expressions, and4 A 1784 translation of Gray's Epitaph includes an example of such a form:BejiHKa HCKpeHHOCTb 6ujia B HeM a IIPHHTCTBO,OH M3fly CBOIO 3a TO OT He6a Bocnpufln. . .