Deriving Pedagogical Strategies from Research on the Conceptual Structures of Russian: The Case of the Genitive Case
Laura
Janda
Case is a remarkably powerful conceptual apparatus. In Russian,
case says to us, take an entity, any entity, and imagine it in a
relationship with anything else, any relationship. Now carve up all
of the relationships one could possibly perceive, and conceptualize
each one as belonging to one or more of a closed set of six cases.
The cognitive complexity marshalled in this austere and fabulously
efficient, elegant little system is literally mind-boggling. It's no
surprise that for our students case is a major stumbling block. As
instructors of Russian, we need to find the means to convey both the
essence and the versatility of the cases to our students. This paper
will suggest a conceptual structure for the genitive case that can be
presented in an accessible way to students. This presentation is
based on over a decade of research in case semantics and cognitive
linguistics. The goal is to utilize the findings of this research to
create pedagogical tools that will help students achieve near-native
proficiency. This example illustrates some of the complexity of the
genitive case:
Fidel&soft; Kastro na pjatom s"ezde svoej
kompartii govoril bez umolku
&shachek;est&soft; casov i sorok tri minuty,
&chachek;to dostojno rekordov
Knigi Ginnessa.
At the fifth congress of his communist party,
Fidel Castro spoke without pause for six
hours and forty-three minutes, an accomplishment
worthy of Guinness' Book
of records.
Here we see six uses of the genitive case in a single sentence, one
that is not even particularly long or unusual. If there were an entry
for Russian case use in the Guinness Book of World
Records, the genitive case would walk off with multiple honors,
among them: 1) The genitive is the most used case in Russian. The
likelihood of finding sentences with six uses of any other case is
relatively small. 2) The genitive is used with over one hundred
prepositions (forty simple prepositions and over seventy complex
ones), vastly more than all the other cases combined. 3) The genitive
is the only case that forms chains of consecutive uses, as in our
example above: dostojno rekordov Knigi Ginnessa,
literally worthy of the records of the Book of
Guinness.
4) The genitive is probably the most complex case in
Russian, and the basic idea of the gentive is perhaps the hardest to
grasp.
These might look like formidable hurdles, but our strategy is to
tackle the last item on the list, the meaning of the genitive. After
that, all the other problems will become opportunities for easy
success.
The uses of the genitive will be described in terms of four
categories: genitive: a source, genitive:: a goal,
genitive:: a whole, and genitive:: a
reference. The four labels used here hint at both what the
basic meaning of the genitive is and why it is so hard to make sense
of it. The genitive is by nature an elusive beast, a sort of
back-seat driver that is always handing off the responsibility of
focusing attention to something else. When we say that something
comes from a source, we generally aren't as interested in the source as
we are in the something that comes from it. The same goes for goals;
while a goal is important, what we really care about is the person or
thing that is headed for it. In the genitive:: a
whole use, there is always another item that plays the role
of the part, and of course when we are talking about something that is
part of a whole, we are focusing our attention on the part more than
on the whole. A reference point is something we use to locate
something else, and in its genitive:: a reference
use, the genitive serves as a mental address for other things. Rather
than turning focus to the item it marks, the genitive deflects our
focus away from it. It is this habit of retreating into the
background that makes the genitive so hard to pin down. Passing the
buck, by the way, also makes the chaining of genitives possible,
allowing focus to bounce from one item to the next.
This paper will explain the four categories of the genitive, how
they are related to each other, and how they motivate all of the
specific uses of the genitive case.