Russian grammar (Russian: грамматика русского языка; [ɡrɐˈmatʲɪkə ˈruskəvə jɪzɨˈka]; also русская грамматика; [ˈruskəjə ɡrɐˈmatʲɪkə]) encompasses:
Contents
- Nouns
- Third declension
- Undeclined nouns
- Rare minor cases
- Adjectives
- Adjectival declension
- Comparison of adjectives
- Possessive adjectives
- Personal pronouns
- Demonstrative pronouns
- Possessive adjectives and pronouns
- Interrogative pronouns
- Numerals
- Verbs
- Infinitive
- Present Future Tense
- Examples
- Past Tense
- Moods
- Imperative Mood
- Conditional Mood
- Verbs of Motion
- Unprefixed Verbs of Motion
- Unidirectional Perfectives with
- Going vs Taking
- Prefixed Verbs of Motion
- Adjectival participle
- Active Present Participle
- Active Past Participle
- Passive Present Participle
- Passive Past Participle
- Adverbial Participle
- Irregular Verbs
- Word Formation
- Syntax
- Impersonal Sentences
- Multiple Negatives
- Adverbial Answers
- Coordination
- Subordination
- Absolute Construction
- References
The Russian language has preserved an Indo-European inflexional structure, although considerable adaptation has taken place.
The spoken language has been influenced by the literary one, but it continues to preserve some characteristic forms. Russian dialects show various non-standard grammatical features, some of which are archaisms or descendants of old forms discarded by the literary language.
NOTE: In the discussion below, various terms are used in the meaning they have in standard Russian discussions of historical grammar. In particular, aorist, imperfect, etc. are considered verbal tenses rather than aspects, because ancient examples of them are attested for both perfective and imperfective verbs.
Nouns
Nominal declension is subject to six cases — nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and prepositional — in two numbers (singular and plural), and absolutely obeying grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter). Up to ten additional cases are identified in linguistics textbooks, although all of them are either incomplete (do not apply to all nouns) or degenerate (appear identical to one of the six simple cases). The most recognized additional cases are locative (в лесу, в крови, в слезах), partitive (чаю, сахару, коньяку), and several forms of vocative (Господи, Боже, отче). The adjectives, pronouns, and the first two cardinal numbers further vary by gender. Old Russian also had a third number, the dual, but it has been lost except for its use in the nominative and accusative cases with the numbers two, three and four (e.g. два стула [dvɐ ˈstulə], "two chairs", now reanalyzed as genitive singular).
More often than in many other Indo-European languages, Russian noun cases may supplant the use of prepositions entirely. Furthermore, every preposition is assigned to a particular case to use with. Their usage can be summarised as:
There are no definite or indefinite articles (such as the, a, an in English) in the Russian language. The sense of a noun is determined from the context in which it appears. That said, there are some means of expressing whether a noun is definite or indefinite. They are:
The category of animacy is relevant in Russian nominal and adjectival declension. Specifically, the accusative has two possible forms in many paradigms, depending on the animacy of the referent. For animate referents (persons and animals), the accusative form is generally identical to the genitive form. For inanimate referents, the accusative form is identical to the nominative form. This principle is relevant for masculine singular nouns of the second declension (see below) and adjectives, and for all plural paradigms (with no gender distinction). In the tables below, this behavior is indicated by the abbreviation N or G in the row corresponding to the accusative case.
In Russian there are three declensions:
There are also a group of several irregular "different-declension nouns" (Russian: разносклоняемые существительные), consisting of a few neuter nouns ending in -мя (e.g. время "time") and one masculine noun путь "way". However, these nouns and their forms have sufficient similarity with feminine third declension nouns that some scholars such as Litnevskaya consider them to be non-feminine forms of this declension, as written in the tables below.
Nouns ending with -ий, -ия, -ие (not to be confused with substantivated adjectives) are written with -ии instead of -ие in Prepositional (as this ending is never stressed, there is no difference in pronunciation): тече́ние - в ни́жнем тече́нии реки́ "streaming – in lower streaming of a river". But if words в течение and в продолжение are representing compound preposition meaning "while, during the time of", they are written with -е: в тече́ние ча́са "in a time of an hour". For nouns ending in -ья, -ье, or -ьё, using -ьи in the Prepositional (where endings of some of them are stressed) is usually erroneous, but in poetic speech it may be acceptable (as we replace -ии with -ьи for metric or rhyming purposes): Весь день она́ лежа́ла в забытьи́ (F. Tyutchev).
Third declension
The third declension is mostly for feminine nouns with some masculine and neuter.
Undeclined nouns
Some nouns (such as borrowings from other languages, abbreviations, etc.) are not modified when they change number and case. This appears mostly when their gender appears to have no ending in any declension which suits the final part of the word.
Rare minor cases
Aside from the six major cases, there are several more rare minor cases. These cases are used for some nouns, and for some they don't. Knowledge of minor cases is not necessary to be understood by Russians, Russian language is quite comprehensible without them. However, the rare cases are necessary for speaking like a native.
Some of the minor cases are:
Adjectives
A Russian adjective ([имя] прилагательное) is usually placed before the noun it qualifies, and it agrees with the noun in case, gender, and number. With the exception of a few invariant forms borrowed from other languages, such as беж 'beige' or хаки 'khaki', most adjectives follow one of a small number of regular declension patterns, except for some which provide difficulty in forming the short form. In modern Russian, the short form appears only in the nominative and is used when the adjective is in a predicative role; formerly (as in the bylinas) short adjectives appeared in all other forms and roles, which are not used in modern language, but are nonetheless understandable to Russian speakers as they are declined exactly like nouns of the corresponding gender.
Adjectives may be divided into three general groups:
Adjectival declension
The pattern described below suits for full forms of most adjectives, except possessive ones; it is also used for substantivated adjectives as учёный and for adjectival participles. Russian differentiates between hard-stem and soft-stem adjectives, shown before and after a slash sign.
- Case endings -ого/-его are to be read as -ово/ево.
- After a sibilant or velar consonant, и is written instead of ы.
- When a masculine adjective ends in -ой (in Nominative), this ending is stressed for all cases: прямо́й ("straight"), cf. упря́мый ("stubborn").
- After a sibilant consonant, neuter adjectives end in -ее. It is sometimes called the "хоро́шее rule".
- Accusative in the masculine gender and in plural depends on animacy, as for nouns.
- Instrumental feminine ending -ой/-ей has alternative form -ою/-ею for all adjectives, which has only stylistical difference.
Comparison of adjectives
Comparison forms are usual only for qualitative adjectives and adverbs. Comparative and superlative synthetic forms are not part of the paradigm of original adjective but are different lexical items, since not all qualitative adjectives have them. A few adjectives have irregular forms which are declined as usual adjectives: большо́й 'big' — бо́льший 'bigger', хоро́ший 'good' — лу́чший 'better'. Most synthetically derived comparative forms are derived by adding -е́е or -е́й to adjective stem: кра́сный 'red' — красне́е 'more red'; these forms are difficult to distinguish from adverbs, and probably they are adverbs. Superlative synthetic forms are derived by adding suffix -е́йш- or -а́йш- and additionally sometimes prefix наи-, or using special comparative form with наи-: до́брый 'kind' — добре́йший 'the kindest', большо́й 'big' — наибо́льший 'the biggest'.
Another way of comparison are analytical forms with adverbs бо́лее 'more' / ме́нее 'less' and са́мый 'most' / наибо́лее 'most' / наиме́нее 'least': до́брый 'kind' — бо́лее до́брый 'kinder' — са́мый до́брый 'the kindest'. This way is rarely used if special comparative forms exists.
Possessive adjectives
Possessive adjectives are used in Russian to a lesser extent than in most other Slavic languages, but are still in use. They answer on the questions чей? чья? чьё? чьи? (whose?) and denote only animated possessors.
Personal pronouns
Demonstrative pronouns
Possessive adjectives and pronouns
Unlike English, Russian uses the same form for a possessive adjective and the corresponding possessive pronoun. In Russian grammar they are called possessive pronouns притяжательные местоимения (compare with possessive adjectives like Peter's = петин above). The following rules apply:
Interrogative pronouns
Numerals
Russian has several classes of numerals ([имена] числительные): cardinal, ordinal, collective, and also fractional constructions; also it has other types of words, relative to numbers: collective adverbial forms (вдвоём), multiplicative (двойной) and counting-system (двоичный) adjectives, some numeric-pronominal and indefinite quantity words (сколько, много, несколько). Here are the numerals from 0 to 10:
Verbs
Grammatical conjugation is subject to three persons in two numbers and two simple tenses (present/future and past), with periphrastic forms for the future and subjunctive, as well as imperative forms and present/past participles, distinguished by adjectival and adverbial usage (see adjectival participle and adverbial participle). Verbs and participles can be reflexive, i.e. have reflexive suffix -ся/-сь appended after ending.
An interesting feature is that the past tense is actually made to agree in gender with the subject, for it is the participle in an originally periphrastic perfect formed (like the perfect passive tense in Latin) with the present tense of the verb "to be" быть [bɨtʲ], which is now omitted except for rare archaic effect, usually in set phrases (откуда есть пошла земля русская [ɐtˈkudə jesʲtʲ pɐˈʂla zʲɪˈmlʲa ˈruskəjə], "whence is come the Russian land", the opening of the Primary Chronicle in modern spelling). The participle nature of past-tense forms is exposed also in that they often have an extra suffix vowel, which is absent in present/future; the same vowel appears in infinitive form, which is considered by few scholars not to be verbal (and in the past it surely used to be a noun), but in which verbs appear in most dictionaries: ходить "to walk" - ходил "(he) walked" - хожу "I walk".
Verbal inflection today is considerably simpler than in Old Russian. The ancient aorist, imperfect, and (periphrastic) pluperfect have been lost, though the aorist sporadically occurs in secular literature as late as the second half of the eighteenth century, and survives as an odd form in direct narration (а он пойди да скажи [ɐ on pɐjˈdʲi də skɐˈʐɨ], etc., exactly equivalent to the English colloquial "so he goes and says"), recategorized as a usage of the imperative. The loss of three of the former six tenses has been offset by the development, as in other Slavic languages, of verbal aspect (вид). Most verbs come in pairs, one with imperfective (несовершенный вид) or continuous, the other with perfective (совершенный вид) or completed aspect, usually formed with a (prepositional) prefix, but occasionally using a different root. E.g., спать [spatʲ] ('to sleep') is imperfective; поспать [pɐˈspatʲ] ('to take a nap') is perfective.
The present tense of the verb быть is today normally used only in the third-person singular form, есть, which is often used for all the persons and numbers. As late as the nineteenth century, the full conjugation, which today is extremely archaic, was somewhat more natural: forms occur in the Synodal Bible, in Dostoevsky and in the bylinas (былины [bɨˈlʲinɨ]) or oral folk-epics, which were transcribed at that time. The paradigm shows as well as anything else the Indo-European affinity of Russian:
Infinitive
The infinitive in Russian has the suffix -ть or -ти, or ends with -чь (but -чь is not a suffix of a verb) (-ся/сь/ся respectively is added after it). It is the basic form of a verb for most purposes of study.
Present-Future Tense
There are two forms used to conjugate the present tense of imperfective verbs and the future tense of perfective verbs.
The first conjugation (I) is used in verb stems ending in:
The second conjugation (II) involves verb stems ending in:
Example: попро-с-ить – попро-ш-у, попро-с-ят [pəprɐˈsʲitʲ, pəprɐˈʂu, pɐˈprosʲɪt] (to have solicited – [I, they] will have solicited).
Examples
There are five irregular verbs:
Past Tense
The Russian past tense is gender specific: –л for masculine singular subjects, –ла for feminine singular subjects, –ло for neuter singular subjects, and –ли for plural subjects. This gender specificity applies to all persons; thus, to say "I slept", a male speaker would say я спал, while a female speaker would say я спалá.
Moods
Russian verbs can form three moods (наклонения): indicative (изъявительное), conditional (сослагательное) and imperative (повелительное).
Imperative Mood
The imperative mood second-person singular is formed from the future-present base of most verbs by adding -и (stressed ending in present-future, or if base ends on more than one consonant), -ь (unstressed ending, base on one consonant) or -й (unstressed ending, base on vowel). Plural (including polite на вы) second-person form is made by adding -те to singular one: говорю 'I speak' - говори - говорите, забуду 'I shall forget' - забудь - забудьте, клею 'I glue' - клей - клейте. Some verbs have first-person plural imperative form with -те added to similar simple future or present tense form: пойдёмте 'let us go'. There are other ways of expressing command in Russian; for third person, for example, пусть particle with future can be used: Пусть они замолчат! 'Let them shut up!'.
Conditional Mood
The conditional mood in Russian is formed by adding the particle бы after the word which marks the supposed subject into a sentence formed like in the past tense. Thus, to say "I would (hypothetically) sleep" or "I would like to sleep", a male speaker would say я спал бы (or я бы поспа́л), while a female speaker would say я спалá бы (or я бы поспала́).
Verbs of Motion
Verbs of motion (also referred to as VoM) are a distinct class of verbs found in several Slavic languages. Due to the extensive semantic information they contain, Russian verbs of motion pose difficulties for non-native learners at all levels of study. Unprefixed verbs of motion, which are all imperfective, divide into pairs based on the direction of the movement (uni- or multidirectional—sometimes called determinate/indeterminate or definite/indefinite). As opposed to a verb-framed language, in which path is encoded in the verb, but manner of motion typically is expressed with complements, Russian is a satellite language, meaning that these concepts are encoded in both the root of the verb and the particles associated with it, satellites. Thus, the roots of motion verbs convey the lexical information of manner of movement, e.g. walking, crawling, running, whereas prefixes denote path, e.g. motion in and out of space. The roots also distinguish between means of conveyance, e.g. by transport or by one’s own power, and, in transitive verbs, the object or person being transported. The information below provides an outline of the formation and basic usage of unprefixed and prefixed verbs of motion.
Unprefixed Verbs of Motion
This table contains 14 commonly-accepted pairs of Russian verbs of motion, adapted from Muravyova.
Unidirectional Perfectives with ПО-
The addition of the prefix по- to a unidirectional verb of motion makes the verb perfective, denoting the beginning of a movement, i.e. 'setting out'. These perfectives imply that the agent has not yet returned at the moment of speech, e.g.,
Going vs. Taking
Three pairs of motion verbs generally refer to ‘taking’, ‘leading’ with additional lexical information on manner of motion and object of transport encoded in the verb stem. These are нести/носить, вести/водить, and везти/возить. See below for the specific information on manner and object of transport:
Prefixed Verbs of Motion
Verbs of motion combine with prefixes to form new aspectual pairs, which lose the distinction of directionality, but gain spatial or temporal meanings. The unidirectional verb serves as the base for the perfective, and the multidirectional as the base for the imperfective. In addition to the meanings conveyed by the prefix and the simplex motion verb, prepositional phrases also contribute to the expression of path in Russian. Thus, it is important to consider the whole verb phrase when examining verbs of motion.
In some verbs of motion, adding a prefix requires a different stem shape:
See below for a table the prefixes, their primary meanings, and the prepositions that accompany them, adapted from Muravyova. Several examples are taken directly or modified from Muravyova.
Idiomatic Uses
The uni- and multidirectional distinction rarely figures into the metaphorical and idiomatic use of motion verbs, because such phrases typically call for one or the other verb. See below for examples:
Adjectival participle
Russian adjectival participles can be active or passive; have perfective or imperfective mood; imperfective participles can have present or past tense, while perfective ones in classical language can be only past. As adjectives, they are declined by case, number and gender. If adjectival participles are derived from reciprocal verbs, they have suffix -ся appended after the adjectival ending; this suffix in participles never takes the short form. Participles are often difficult to distinguish from deverbal adjectives (this is important for some cases of orthography).
Active Present Participle
Лю́ди, живу́щие в э́том го́роде, о́чень до́брые и отве́тственные – The people living in this city are very kind and responsible.
In order to form the Active Present Participle you should replace the "т" of the 3-rd pers. plur. of the Present Tense by "щ" and add a necessary adjective ending:
Note: Only imperfective verbs can have an Active Present Participle.
(*) Note: These forms are obsolete in modern Russian and they aren't used in the spoken language as forms of the verb 'to be'.
Active Present Participle Declension
Reflexive Verbs Paradigm
The participle agrees in gender, case and number with the word it refers to:
Я посвяща́ю э́ту пе́сню лю́дям, живу́щим в на́шем го́роде – I dedicate this song to the people living in our city.
Я горжу́сь людьми́, живу́щими в на́шем го́роде – I’m proud of the people living in our city.
Active Past Participle
Active Past Participle is used in order to indicate actions that happened in the past: Де́вушка, чита́вшая тут кни́гу, забы́ла свой телефо́н – The girl, that read this book here, forgot her phone (the girl read the book in the past).
Compare: Де́вушка, чита́ющая тут кни́гу, – моя́ сестра́ – The girl reading this book here is my sister (she is reading the book now, in the present).
In order to form the Active Past Participle you should replace the infinitive ending '-ть' by the suffix '-вш-' and add an adjective ending:
Active Past Participle Declension
Reflexive Verbs Paradigm
Passive Present Participle
обсуждать – to discuss обсужда́емый – being discussed
In order to form the Passive Present Participle it’s necessary to add an adjective ending to the 1-st plural of the Present Tense:
These participles are hardly ever used in modern Russian. Normally, they are replaced by reflexive active present participles:
‘рису́ющийся’ instead of ‘рису́емый’ – being drawn, drawable
‘мо́ющийся’ instead of ‘мо́емый’ – being washed
The forms ending in ‘-омый’ are mostly obsolete. Only the forms ‘ведо́мый’ (from ‘вести́’ – to lead) and ‘иско́мый’ (from ‘иска́ть’ – to search, to look for) are used in spoken language as adjectives:
ведо́мый челове́к – a slave man
иско́мая величина́ – the unknown quantity
Passive Past Participle
сде́лать – to do/to make (perfective verb) сдела́нный – done/made
Passive Past Participles are formed by means of the suffixes ‘-нн-’ or ‘-т-’ from the infinitive stem of perfective verbs. Besides that, this kind of participle can have short forms formed by means of the suffixes ‘-н-’ or ‘-т-’:
Adverbial Participle
Adverbial participles (деепричастия) are not declined, quite like usual adverbs. They inherit the aspect of their verb; imperfective ones are usually present, while perfective ones can be only past (since they denote action performed by the subject, the tense corresponds to time of action denoted by verb). Almost all Russian adverbial participles are active; to form passive constructions, adverbial participle forms of verb быть (past бывши, present будучи) may be used with either adjectival participle in instrumental case (Будучи раненным, боец оставался в строю — Combatant, being wounded, remained in the row), or short adjective in nominative (Бывши один раз наказан, он больше так не делал — Having been punished once, he didn't do it any more).
Present adverbial participles are formed by adding suffix -а/-я (sometimes -учи/-ючи which is usually deprecated) to present-tense stem. Few of past participles (mainly of intransitive verbs of motion) are formed in similar manner. Most past adverbial participles are formed with suffix -в (alternative form -вши, always used before -сь), some with stem ending on consonant — with -ши. Reciprocal ones have suffix -сь at their very end (in poetry can appear as -ся).
Adverbial participles in standard Russian are believed to be feature of bookish speech; in colloquial language they are usually replaced with single adjectival participles or constructions with verbs: Пообедав, я пошёл гулять → Я пообедал и пошёл гулять ("I had dinner and went for a walk"). But in some dialects adverbial and adjectival participles are common to produce perfect forms which are not distinguished in literary Russian; e.g. "I haven't eaten today" will be "Я сегодня не евши" instead of "Я сегодня не ела".
Irregular Verbs
1These verbs all have a stem change.
2These verbs are palatalised in certain cases, namely с → ш for all the present forms of "писа́ть", and д → ж in the first person singular of the other verbs.
3These verbs do not conform to either the first or second conjugations.
Word Formation
Russian has on hand a set of prefixes, prepositional and adverbial in nature, as well as diminutive, augmentative, and frequentative suffixes and infixes. All of these can be stacked one upon the other to produce multiple derivatives of a given word. Participles and other inflectional forms may also have a special connotation. For example:
Russian has also proven friendly to agglutinative compounds. As an extreme case:
Purists (as Dmitry Ushakov in the preface to his dictionary) frown on such words. But here is the name of a street in St. Petersburg:
Some linguists have suggested that Russian agglutination stems from Church Slavonic. In the twentieth century, abbreviated components appeared in the compound:
Syntax
The basic word order, both in conversation and the written language, is subject–verb–object in transitive clauses, and free word order in intransitive clauses. However, because the relations are marked by inflection, considerable latitude in word order is allowed even in transitive clauses, and all the permutations can be used. For example, the words in the phrase "я пошёл в магазин" ('I went to the shop') can be arranged
while maintaining grammatical correctness. Note, however, that the order of the phrase "в магазин" ("to the shop") is kept constant.
The word order can express the logical stress, and the degree of definiteness. Primary emphasis tends to be initial, with a slightly weaker emphasis at the end. Note that some of these arrangements can describe present actions, not only past (despite the fact that the verb пошёл is in the past).
Impersonal Sentences
Russian is a null-subject language — it allows constructing sentences without subject (Russian: безличные предложения). Some of them are disputed not to be really impersonal but to have oblique subject. One possible classification of such sentences distinguishes:
Multiple Negatives
Unlike in standard English, multiple negatives are compulsory in Russian, as in "никто никогда никому ничего не прощает" [nʲɪkˈto nʲɪkɐɡˈda nʲɪkɐˈmu nʲɪtɕɪˈvo nʲɪ prɐɕˈɕæjɪt] ('No-one ever forgives anyone for anything' literally, "no one never to no-one nothing does not forgive"). Usually, only one word in a sentence has negative particle or prefix "не" or belongs to negative word "нет", while another words have negation-affirmative particle or prefix "ни"; but this word can often be easily omitted, and thus ни becomes the signal of negation: вокруг никого нет and вокруг никого both mean "there is nobody around".
Adverbial Answers
As a one-word answer to an affirmative sentence, yes translates да and no does нет, as shown by the table below.
There is no simple rule for giving an adverbial answer to a negative sentence. B. Comrie says that in Russian answer да or нет is determined not so much by the negative form of the question as by the questioner's intent of using negation, or whether the response is in agreement with his presupposition. In many cases that means that adverbial answer should be extended for avoiding ambiguity; in spoken language, intonation in saying нет can also be significant to if it is affirmation of negation or negation of negation.
Note that while expressing an affirmation of negation by extending "да" with a negated verb is grammatically acceptable, in practice it is more common to answer "нет" and subsequently extend with a negated verb paralleling the usage in English. Also, when answering a negative sentence with a non-extended "нет", it is usually interpreted as an affirmation of negation again in a way similar to English.
Alternatively, both positive and negative simple questions easily can be answered by simply repeating the predicate with or without не, especially if да/нет is ambiguous: in the latest example, "Сержусь." or "Не сержусь."
Coordination
The most common types of coordination expressed by compound sentences in Russian are conjoining, oppositional, and separative. Additionally, the Russian grammar considers comparative, complemental, and clarifying. Other flavors of meaning may also be distinguished.
Conjoining coordinations are formed with the help of the conjunctions и, да, ни...ни (simultaneous negation), также, тоже (the latter two have complementary flavors). Most commonly the conjoining coordination expresses enumeration, simultaneity or immediate sequence. They may also have a cause-effect flavor.
Oppositional coordinations are formed with the help of the oppositional conjunctions а, но, да, однако, зато, же, etc. They express the semantic relations of opposition, comparison, incompatibility, restriction, or compensation.
Separative coordinations are formed with the help of the separative conjunctions или, либо, ли...ли, то...то, etc., and are used to express alternation or incompatibility of things expressed in the coordinated sentences.
Complemental and clarifying coordination expresses additional, but not subordinated, information related to the first sentence.
Comparative coordination is a semantic flavor of the oppositional one.
Common coordinating conjunctions include:
The distinction between и and а is important. И implies a following complemental state that does not oppose the antecedent. А implies a following state that acts in opposition to the antecedent, but more weakly than но "but".
The distinction between и and а developed after medieval times. Originally, и and а were closer in meaning. The unpunctuated ending of the Song of Igor illustrates the potential confusion. The final five words in modern spelling, "князьям слава а дружине аминь" [knʲɪˈzʲjam ˈslavə ɐ druˈʐɨnʲɪ ɐˈmʲinʲ] can be understood either as "Glory to the princes and to their retinue! Amen." or "Glory to the princes, and amen (R.I.P.) to their retinue". Although the majority opinion is definitely with the first interpretation, there is no full consensus. The psychological difference between the two is quite obvious.
Subordination
Complementizers (subordinating conjunctions, adverbs, or adverbial phrases) include:
In general, there are fewer subordinate clauses than in English, because the participles and adverbial participles often take the place of a relative pronoun/verb combination. For example:
Absolute Construction
Despite the inflectional nature of Russian, there is no equivalent in the modern language to the English nominative absolute or the Latin ablative absolute construction. The old language had an absolute construction, with the noun put into the dative. Like so many other archaisms, it is retained in Church Slavonic. Among the last known examples in literary Russian occurs in Radishchev's Journey from Petersburg to Moscow (Путешествие из Петербурга в Москву [pʊtʲɪˈʂɛstvʲɪjɪ ɪs pʲɪtʲɪrˈburɡə v mɐˈskvu]), 1790: