Page 84 - Difference or Disorder Digital Version

Chapter 12: RUSSIAN

learner of English may palatalize consonants in English due the influence of this part of Russian

phonology.

SPECIAL NOTE: CASE

In Russian, nouns and pronouns have many different forms. These morphological forms are

called cases. Case is a grammatical category that reflects what role a noun plays in a sentence.

Many languages use a variety of cases. There are six cases in Russian: nominative, genitive,

accusative, dative, prepositional, and instrumental.

Case name Used to mark… Example
Nominative subject of a verb The boy is playing.
Genitive possession The leg of the table broke OR the table’s leg
broke.
Accusative direct object of a I saw the painting.
verb
Dative indirect object of a I gave the letter to my friend.
verb
Prepositional object of a He thinks about the homework.
preposition
Instrumental an object used to I cut with scissors.
perform an action

Russian nouns and pronouns undergo morphological changes depending on case and number.

The inflection of nouns in this way is called declension. The bolded parts of the sentences

above would be translated into Russian as one word with a special ending that indicates case.

Research on crosslinguistic transfer in bilinguals indicates that sometimes case markers are

carried over into one’s second language in the acquisition process (Jarvis & Odlin, 2000;

Zaretsky & Bar‐Shalom, 2000). An example of crosslinguistic transfer would be the addition

of “a” or “om” to an English noun (e.g. balla or ballom).

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