Coffee cup and school grammar

I am on Facebook in one closed group, which is called the "Methodical Piggy Code". In this group, a little less than five thousand teachers of the Russian language and literature speak and consult how to teach their subjects. The literature discusses many different topics: how is the drama Samson Virin is explained? And what to show interesting productions of "grief from the mind"? And is Salieri right, that Mozart was easy to write music? And in the Russian language - almost only one: syntax.

I am a theoretical linguist and teach a general syntax course in the tower, and therefore it is very interesting for me to read teacher syntactic discussions. What a phrase, for example, a cup of coffee, the teachers ask each other: control or adjoining? What is the type of predicate in the sentence Down with the bourgeoisie? And what is the member of the sentence of the word in the genitive in the phrases a collection of brands and the rite of initiation: is this management or inconsistent definition? And in the sentence , who and why built this house? Words who and why are homogeneous members? They answer different questions ...

The level of discussion is very high. Teachers come up with explanations and immediately - examples contrary to these explanations are trying to build arguments - and immediately find holes in them. Why teachers are these discussions, it is clear: they want to develop clear and consistent explanations for schoolchildren. Teachers perfectly understand what the material should be so that it can be clearly explained. Most often, however, they have little to come out.

I read them with a sense of acute irritation, not to them, but to myself: sometimes I can’t answer the questions that they ask there at all - sometimes I can - but not at all in the language that they speak.

* * *

Teachers are not to blame. Those conceptual schemes and sets of concepts with which they are burdened with the program are simply bad.

Modern school grammar is based on the ideas of Alexander Peshkovsky - a wonderful Russian linguist at the beginning of the 20th century, the author of the famous book “Russian Syntax in Scientific Light”. The purpose of this book was to raise at the modern (for the then) time a scientific level of school study of grammar: indeed, to Peshkovsky, as Yu. D. Apresyan points out, the post -fiction was considered as a direct addition as a direct addition -on the grounds that it came from the vinological case of a returnable pronoun. To some extent, Peshkovsky reached this goal: after him, no one suggested such an analysis .

Postfix -sy -this is no longer an addition; Is there enough this increase in the scientific level that Peshkovsky achieved today? Has syntactic science changed for this century somehow radically? I belong to that school of linguists who believe that yes.

“To date” here is actually even an extra political correct word. Has the Russian syntax has changed so much in the eyelids? Of course not. Despite the fact that Peshkovsky’s syntax described language material much better than the XIX century syntax, neither he, nor other works in his tradition-I mean primarily both academic grammars of 1970 and 1980-apparently they cannot offer any slender theory that can be taught at school.

Problems begin at the very beginning of the school syntactic course: in the concepts of coordination , management and adjustment .

Let's see how these terms are determined by a very authoritative source - the 1980 academic grammar. “Actually, the adjacency is a connection in which the words are unchanged in the role of an dependent word: an adverb, unchanged adjective, as well as infinitive, comparative or participle.” Well, but in what sense is the infinitive - an unchanged word? Is it really the personal forms of the verb I write, write, wrote - is this one word, and to write an infinitive - another? And the adverb: the adverb has comparative degrees, how does it come out unchanged? And what with unchanged nouns the type of coffee: maybe a cup of coffee is also a adjacency?

And then academic grammar distinguishes the “case junction”. “A case junction is an accession to a significant word (any part of speech) case (without an excuse or with a pretext) form of a name with a definitive meaning”: to arrive on the fifth of May, come in the evening, a spoon of wood, a city on the Volga. Yes, apparently, there is some difference between a syntactic connection in the phrases of a spoon of wood and an outcome from Egypt; But why does this difference still need to be stuffed into the volume of the term adjustment? “The case junction” is an oxymoron, a logical nonsense: the noun has case forms exactly because it can change - lean. In general, our academic grammar is not an example of classical European rationality ... Something like this is all arranged: next to interesting and substantial guesses-dark places, obscure phrases, confusion with definitions and causal connections.

The three -part division of phrases for coordination, management and adjoining encounters two problems. The first problem of this classification is its hyperarotism. It is so revered that in the classical Peshkovian tradition - and means at school! -It is impossible to also think of dividing Russian phrases into two, or perhaps into four types, not to mention to abandon Peshkovsky’s terms and call them differently. You can only quietly reduce the values ​​of the terms consecrated by time - what, as we saw, is the academic grammar.

Another problem of the three -part classification is its weak logical base. We will give short definitions of management, coordination and adjacency (equivalent to the definitions of “grammar-80”):

• Management is a syntactic connection expressed by an accession to the main word dependent in the form of an indirect case (the form of the dependent does not depend on the form of the main one);
• Coordination is a syntactic connection expressed by the assimilation of the dependent word to the main;
• The adjacency is a syntactic connection, in which the dependent word in principle is unchanged and therefore the connection itself is not expressed in any way.

It is easy to see that these definitions, firstly, do not exclude each other in any way, and secondly, do not exhaust the circle of logical capabilities. Because of this, our three-part classification falls into different unpleasant traps, which was not so difficult to avoid. For example, as you know, traditional grammar refuses the status of the phrase to the subject and predicate.

On the one hand, as you know, the subject is under a predicate in the nominative case. We can say that the predicate controls the nominative case of the subject. On the other hand, the predicate is consistent with the subject - sometimes in a kind, sometimes in the face, and even among them - almost always. It is not clear, in this way, which of the subject and predicate is the main word, and who is dependent, the first one is controlled by the second, and the second is consistent with the first.

Traditional grammar breaks in this place and says that we are not in front of us at all. Of course, there is a syntactic connection, but some other, more mysterious nature. Coordination is called, but there is no phrase here, traditional grammar tells us.

You can, of course, determine the phrase as narrowly as done in traditional grammar. But why? Is it true that the connection of the subject and predicate has some special nature, which is fundamentally different from all other syntactic ties-and that is why only between them is coordination?

* * *

I would like to ask, where does modern linguistics look? Does she know how to explain something better than the classification of Peshkovsky?

Modern linguistics, in general, looks there. And yes, he can.

The main nerve of modern linguistics is syntax. Despite the stunning discoveries of neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics, corps linguistics and various other modern linguistics, the syntax remains a sort of shining crown of the linguistic building. (I myself say this with some regret: if I am someone, then a semantist.) For the linguist of the Peshkovsky school, this may be joyful, but very amazing: how is it, syntax is very boring! (V. M. Alpatov notes that one of the best Moscow linguists of the 20th century P. S. Kuznetsov did not like syntax, “like all the scientists of his schools”).

At this top in the 1950s, the syntax erected Noah Khomsky-and from this time the most exciting puzzles are opened in the syntax and the most daring hypotheses are offered. Skeptics will say that over these sixty years we have learned quite little; Maybe - but it is impossible to deny that we learned how much we still do not know. Of course, the modern person of linguistics is almost the same as the Khomskians, is determined by functional-typological linguistics, which arose as a reaction to the Khomsky program-but it also became possible, in fact, as a reaction to it. In order to deny the provisions of Khomsky, it was necessary to enter into a dialogue with him - and for this to think about how syntax works - to think incomparably deeper than it was accepted, for example, at the beginning of the 20th century.

Of course, the school course in the Russian language did not notice all this. (And should have been?)

* * *

Consider a few words and sentences of the Hebrew language.

a. báyit - 'house';
B. léḥem - 'bread';
C. Hammélek - 'King.def';
D. bêt hammélek - 'House of the Tsar';
E. bêt léḥem - 'House of bread'.

In Russian, if we ask ourselves a noble (and meaningless) task to make a house and bread from two words with the meaning of 'House of Bread', we will have to put bread in the genitive case. The word house can be in any case, and bread in the genitive. We can assume that the genitive case on an addicted word marks the syntactic connection between the two nouns. As a matter of fact, if we decide to arrange a syntactic connection between the two Russian nouns, then in most cases it will label the genitive case on a dependent word.

And in a different way, the opposite is true! Only the main word is changing: it was báyit, but it became bê. Forms of the type bêt (as exactly they are formed in Hebrew, now it doesn’t matter) are called Status Constructus , or “conjugated state”. Nouns in the conjugated state shout to us: another noun depends on me! Unlike the Russian language, the syntactic connection is marked on the main word, and not on the dependent.

One of the leading typologists of the 20th century Johanna Nikols proposed the following classification of the expression of syntactic connection in the phrase.

It is easy to see that this simple and elegant classification satisfies the requirements that we presented to the classification of Peshkovsky: these four options, firstly, exhaust the space of opportunities (nothing else can be imagined), and secondly, mutually exclude each other. And it turns out that in the languages ​​of the world there are examples for each line of this table. Traditional management and coordination in the Russian language is an example of dependence marks, ancient Hebrew structures with a conjugated state - the vertex, and the Russian subject and predicate - double.

Another example of double marking is the same designs of two nouns as we saw above, in the Moksha (one of the two languages ​​of Mordovia). In it, the dependent word is decorated with a genitive case, and on the main one a special suffix appears, which means the face and number of the dependent word (2):

a. Mon 'kud-əz'əz-Y.Gen house-poss.1SG;
B. at'ɛ-t 'kud-əc-father-def.gen
house-Poss.3SG-'House of Father';
C. at'ɛ-t'n'n'ə-n 'kud-əsnə-father-def.pl-gen house-poss.3pl-' House of Fathers'.

(Gen - genitive case, Def - animation, PL - plural, POSS - sessive indicator.)

It turns out that the main word is consistent with the dependent in the face and the number, and the dependent word receives from the main case: exactly the same as with Russian grammatical foundations. What to do with these data in the tradition of Peshkovsky: also not to recognize phrases?

The same Mokshansky can offer another example of double marketing. Transition verbs are consistent with the face and the number not only with the subject, but also with a direct addition - that is, the syntactic connection of the verb and direct addition is also marked on both participants in this pair.

(3) mon luv-sa kniga-t '-I read 1sg.s.3sg.o book-def. Gen - 'I will read the book.'
(4) mon luv-sajn'ə kn'iga-tn'ən '-I read 1sg.s.3sg.o soup-def.gen-pl-' I will read books. '

(1, 3 - persons, genus - genitive case, Def - animation, PL - plural, s - subject, sg - the only number.)

Of course, the designs like those that we have now seen are not unique to either Hebrew or Moksha. Moreover, it cannot be said that the dependent in the Russian and European languages ​​dependent-sympathetic labeling in a sense is more normal-or at least more often.

* * *

Obviously, in order to better understand the nature of phrases in the Russian language, it was necessary to look beyond its limits. It turned out that double marking like that can be observed in Russian structures such as “subject + predicate” is not uncommon.

Can this be implemented in school teaching? God news.

Can I say whether the phrase coffee is a phrase control or a junction? No.

Alexey Kozlov,
scientific. sore. Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, senior teacher,
graduate student of the Faculty of Humanities of the Higher School