Traditionally, the main types of relations in syntax are believed to be co-ordination (parataxis) and subordination (hypotaxis). Besides this two-member opposition, there may be distinguished one more, consisting of four members, namely predicative, object, adverbial and attributive rela­tions. How these two oppositions correlate, their similarities and differences remain unclear though this question is quite essential […]

The personal pronouns are characterized by quite different values for the language. The first person pronouns — I, we — as well as the second person pronoun you do not substitute for anything and do not share their functions with anything, since they represent the speaker and the hearer in commu­nication. The personal pronouns of […]

Notional words signifying states and used as predicatives were first identified as a separate part of speech in the Russian language by academi­cians Lev Shcherba and Viktor Vinogradov. The two scholars defined the categorical meaning of the newly identified part of speech as that of state (and, correspondingly, separate words making up this category were […]

The main syntactic function of adjectives is that of an attribute. As a rule, attributes expressed by adjectives precede nouns that are modified. However, attributes may also occur in a post-position, which gives them additional emphasis: A plastic ball, in white and yellow stripes, rolled softly and with decep­tive slowness from one dry tuft of […]