Morphological Change and Variation in Modern Russian Verbs. Lecture by Tore Nesset (University of Tromso)

Among the most fundamental characteristics of language are change and variation. All living languages change, and language change creates variation. In this paper, I address two examples of ongoing change and variation in verbs in modern Russian. The first example is suffix shift, the process whereby verb forms such as каплет are replaced by капает . The second example concerns verbs with suffix- ну -, such as сохнуть , which shows variation in the past tense ( сох vs. сохнул ). I will show that use of large electronic corpora (e.g., The Russian National Corpus) facilitates a more precise understanding of morphological variation and change.