A New Russian Reference Grammar

reference grammar of 472 pages, and it is understandable that much detail will necessarily be suppressed and many paths of inquiry not taken. The focus of the ensuing review will be to sketch and evaluate the author's approach and its overall presentation of Russian so that the reader will have a good sense of what this book is doing. I will not list what I think to be missed points, incomplete data, fuzzy or overly brief discussions of grammatical categories. The reader will recognize that A Reference Grammar of Russian is far from a list of tables of normative Russian linguistic patterns as in popular handbooks, or a pedagogical tool for foreign learners or L2 language classes, or a formal model designed to test a theory of grammar. This book is not addressed to the undergraduate student of Russian wanting to learn how to read or speak. It is not for a formal syntactician searching for the theory of raising verbs, government and control structures, or notions on the lexical specification of case-number-gender agreement with Russian examples. The presentation is stubbornly original and uncompromisingly complex in detail and at times obscure in its terminology. Data are subsumed in vast tables diagramming the interplay of form and meaning expressed as clines or gradients built on probabilities and pragmatic contexts. T. belongs to no single school of linguistics, though the shadow of his teacher, the premier Slavist of the generation, Roman Jakobson, hovers over the work like a guiding and reproving spirit. This book "is especially concerned with the meaning of combinations of words (constructions). The core concept is that of the predicate history: a record of the states of entities through time and across possibilities" (publisher's blurb).