The formation of the imperative in Modern Russian

Abstract

The following paper is an attempt to use the so-called "analytical syntheticfunctional" method to describe the formation of the synthetic imperative word forms in Russian. This method was initially developed to describe the inflection of Russian verbs in the preterit and present tenses (Lehfeldt, 1978a; Lehfeldt, 1978b) and was later also utilized in studies analyzing the formation of the present tense in Serbo-Croatian (Kempgen and Lehfeldt, 1978), Macedonian (Kempgen, 1979), Slovak (Lehfeldt, 1979), Czech (Berger, 1981) and Bulgarian (Kaltwasser and Kempgen, 1981). In this study we will furnish only a brief description of the "analyticalsynthetic- functional" method; for additional information the reader is advised to refer to Lehfeldt (1978a), which discusses the method's basics as well as the Steps involved in its application. The method itself is divided into three principal parts. In the first, the "analytical" section, the various means of expression which a language uses to construct particular word forms are described and analyzed. In the second, "synthetic" part, the relationships between the various means of expression are examined; that is, the theoretically possible combinations of the means of expression are compared with the combinations actually occurring in reality. This comparison in turn makes possible an initial numerical characterization of particular Subsystems by means of the socalled "measure of combination". Furthermore, the relationships between the above-mentioned means of expression and the carriers of the nongrammatical meaning of the word-forms, the so-called "basic forms", are analyzed. In this manner we obtain a further numerical characterization of the given Subsystem, the "measure of predictability". In the final, "functional" part of the method, we are primarily concerned with the actual functional load of the individual means of expression and their various combinations. Before we begin with the description of word-form formation in the imperative, it is necessary to separately discuss a problem which we have designated the "delimitation of synthetic word forms", a problem which in contrast to the present or preterit tenses - has not been satisfactorily solved for the imperative.