Monday, May 22, 2006

Russian Word Order, II

One thing I noticed about your sentence "здесь нельзя говорят громко" was that you had the adverb after the verb it modified. That struck me as a little odd, but I wasn't sure if it's actual good Russian to put the adverb first, or if that's just how my own, personal, non-native Russian idolect works.

So I checked in my big, fat Russian grammar book (which I love with a love that should probably be saved for another human being) and I was right. It's more common to put the adverb before the verb it modifies. If you don't, you're putting a lot of emphasis on the adverb as a new piece of information, since Russian word order defaults to given + new.

1 Comments:

Blogger Katya said...

I should add that the "adverb before verb" rule would also apply to your other sample sentence: "они пишут по-русски правильно."

8:33 AM  

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