Regularizing processes in Russian verb morphology
Natalia Slioussar
Utrecht institute of Linguistics OTS and St.Petersburg State University
slioussar@gmail.com, n.slioussar@uu.nl
Maria Holodilova
St.Petersburg State University
hol_m@mail.ru
In inflectional paradigms, the invariance of the stem is often compromised by various alternations.
This talk discusses several processes currently taking place in colloquial Russian that aim to get rid of
such alternations.
Firstly, we look at consonant alternations, such as s//š, v//vl etc. Historically, they were present both in
verbal and in nominal paradigms, as well as in derived words (e.g. ruka ‘hand’ – ručka ‘small hand,
handle, or pen’, ukrasit' ‘to decorate’ – ukrašenie ‘decoration’). While they are still used in derivation,
nominal paradigms got rid of them, with several exceptions. Notably, apart from frozen forms like
bože (an old Vocative from bog ‘god’, now used mostly as an exclamation), all such cases resemble
the word suk ‘bough, knot’, where all Singular forms share one stem (suk-) and all Plural forms have
another one (sučj-). A more complex picture in verbal paradigms is discussed in this talk.
According to the system developed by Roman Jacobson and his followers (Jakobson 1948; Townsend
1975), Russian has 23 verb classes and several so called anomalous verbs. The verb class is defined by
the correlation pattern between the present/future tense stem and the past tense stem, which may
involve truncation or addition of the final consonant or vowel and various alternations: root vowel
alternations, suffix alternations and final consonant alternations in some forms. Consonant alternations
are present in several non-productive classes and in one productive class out of five, I-class. I-class
has them in the 1SG present/future tense form and in the passive past participle (e.g. brosit' ‘to throw’
– brošu – brošennyj).
Internet searches show that novel verbs in the I-class, such as fotošopit' ‘to photoshop’, tusit' ‘to hang
out, to party’ and many others, are often used without alternations. The 1SG form is derived incorrectly
significantly more often than the passive past participle. E.g. if we take fotošopit', about 25% of 1SG
forms lack alternations, compared to about 10% of passive past participles.
Non-novel verbs in the I-class, including infrequent ones, as well as verbs from non-productive
classes,1 rarely miss alternations, although a number of mistakes can be found. E.g. in case of krasit'
‘to paint’, 1% of 1SG forms and a negligibly small number of passive past participles (less than 0,01%)
lack alternations. The fact that some of these mistakes are deliberate and are made to parody
substandard speech is telling by itself. The only exceptions are several non-novel verbs that lack a
normative 1SG form due to a historical accident, e.g. pobedit' ‘to win’ (a periphrastic construction like
oderžu pobedu ‘(I) will achieve victory’ should be used instead). If 1SG forms from such verbs are
used nevertheless, they are without alternations in the majority of cases.
In addition to this, the data from a previously conducted experiment with pseudoverbs (Gor &
Chernigovskaya 2001; Slioussar 2001) were analyzed with respect to consonant alternations. This
experiment was carried out orally on 27 native speakers of Russian. 48 pseudoverbs, including ten
verbs compatible with I-class, were used in the following dialogues. The experimenter said:
“Yesterday they wugged. What do they do today? And you? What do you do today?”, prompting the
subjects to generate 3PL and 1SG forms. Out of the forms derived according to the I-class rules, 52%
lacked alternations. Moreover, two subjects generated incorrect alternations (like s//sl, d//dl), never
evidenced in Russian.
Thus, the tendency to get rid of alternations shows up wherever it is not counteracted by the
prescriptive norm: in those cases where a normative form does not exist in literary Russian, in novel
words that have not entered literary Russian yet and in pseudowords. We argue that 1SG forms loose
alternations more easily than passive past participles because the latter have a paradigm of their own
1
In these classes, a different process is at work: in the course of last centuries, many less frequent verbs moved to productive
classes by changing their paradigm and got rid of consonant alternations as a result. In some verbs, like stradat' ‘to suffer’,
the old forms already became archaic, in the others, like makhat' ‘to wave’, the new forms are still substandard.
inside the verbal paradigm, being inflected for case, number and gender. All forms in this paradigm
share the stem with alternations. For 1SG forms, the pressure to get rid of alternations is much stronger
because other forms in the present/future tense paradigm lack them. This has interesting consequences
for psycholinguistics theories discussing how word forms are generated: whether they are retrieved
from memory or computed online, whether they are formed by rules or by analogy.
Interestingly, I-class is also the only productive class that belongs to the 2nd conjugation type in the
present/future tense (except for the 1SG form, two conjugation types have different endings: -eš, -et,
-em, -ete, -ut vs. -iš, -it, -im, -ite, -at). Mistakes in the conjugation type show a different pattern. In
non-novel verbs they are made more often than alternation mistakes, but their frequency does not
increase in novel verbs. They were also quite rare in the experiment mentioned above. Thus, the
conjugation type is firmly tied with the verb class, and native speakers make mistakes only when they
are not sure to which class the verb belongs.
Another case we discuss in this talk concerns stress shifts within verbal paradigms. Russian verbs may
have different stress patterns in the past tense and present/future tense paradigms: a (all stresses on the
stem), b (all stresses on endings, wherever they are non-zero) and c (mixed pattern). According to the
database of Russian verbs created by Natalia Slioussar on the basis of The grammatical dictionary of
Russian (Zaliznyak 1977) (www.slioussar.ru/verbdatabase.htm), all three stress patterns are
considerably frequent in the present/future tense, while in the past tense, the b and c patterns can be
found only in a small number of verbs from several non-productive classes:
b: bereč' ‘to protect, to spare’: bereg (SG MASC), beregla (SG FEM), bereglo (SG NEUT), beregli
(PL)2
c: sorvat' ‘to pluck, to wreck’: sorval (SG MASC), sorvala (SG FEM), sorvalo (SG NEUT), sorvali (PL)
As examples above show, in both stress patterns there is one form where the stem differs from the
others. In the c stress pattern, it is the SG FEM form, in the b stress pattern, it is the SG MASC form with
zero ending. Almost all verbs with the c stress pattern have substandard forms with stress shifts.
Firstly, they have a SG FEM form with the stress on the stem (e.g. sorvala). This is expected: then all
forms in the paradigm share the same stem.
However, other developments are less straightforward. Many verbs also have a substandard SG NEUT
form with the stress on the ending (e.g. sorvalo). This shows that, firstly, regularization is not
necessarily unidirectional, different forms changed to achieve uniformity may coexist, and, secondly,
that this process may affect only a part of the paradigm: Plural forms do not have variants with stress
shifts. It is also interesting that this process is not impeded by the fact that SG MASC forms with zero
endings cannot undergo stress shift.
Analogous processes do not take place in the b stress pattern, which is expected: the only form with
the stress on the stem cannot be changed to resemble the others. However, there is substandard
regularization on a different level. E.g. all verbs in the D-T-class belong to the b stress pattern in the
past tense, except for klast' ‘to put’ and krast' ‘to steal’ (and their prefixed derivates). In substandard
Russian, these exceptions are ‘corrected’.
Finally, it should be noted that some changes have nothing to do with regularization. For example, all
three present/future tense stress patterns can be found in the I-class (a: 2923 verbs, b: 2396 verbs, c:
1556 verbs, according to the above-mentioned database). In substandard Russian, many verbs are
currently moving from the b to the c pattern (e.g. zvonit' ‘to call’: zvonju, zvoniš, zvonit, zvonim…
instead of zvonju, zvoniš, zvonit, zvonim…).
References
Gor, K., & Chernigovskaya, T. (2001). Rules in the processing of Russian verbal morphology. In:
Zybatow, G., Junghanns, U., Mehlhorn, G., & Szucsich, L. (Eds.), Current Issues in Formal Slavic
Linguistics (pp. 528–536). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Jakobson, R.O. (1948). Russian conjugation. Word, 4, 155-167.
Slioussar, N. (2001). Mental lexicon and Russian verb morphology: An experimental study. In: Niemi,
J., & Heikkinen, J. (Eds.), Morphology 2000 (pp. 32-44). Joensuu: University of Joensuu.
2
Past tense forms, being former participles that lost their auxiliary, are not inflected for person.
Townsend, C.E. (1975). Russian word formation. Cambridge, MA: Slavica.
Zaliznyak, A.A. (1977). Grammatičeskij slovar’ russkogo jazyka. Slovoizmenenie (‘The grammatical
dictionary of Russian. Inflection.’). Moscow: Russkij Jazyk.