Product Overview
Most students who take Russian wonder about various aspects of its phonology and grammatical system, especially the idiosyncrasies and intricacies that differ markedly from English. Many sense that a more orderly system must underlie the complex and often confusing system presented in beginning textbooks. Hart's book introduces students to Russian linguistics through a study of various topics in phonetics, phonology, and grammar. It assumes no previous knowledge of linguistics. The first three chapters deal with phonetics, phonology, and review several fundamental alternations. Questions about exceptional forms lead to the book's fourth chapter, a survey of topics from the history of Russian. The second part of the book returns to the modern language and concentrates on inflectional and derivational morphology and introduces fundamental concepts of morphophonemics. The final chapter, which draws on much of what was presented in earlier chapters, provides a description of Russian stress according to the latest theory and presents a methodology for predicting stress, given certain information. Major dialectal deviations from standard usage are discussed in most chapters. Appendices include a key to the exercises, stress valencies of high-frequency roots, definitions of key terms and principles used throughout the text, and a bibliography and index. The book is aimed primarily at advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students of Russian, but parts of it will be useful for advanced graduate students.
