Чтение онлайн

Another example shows the verb «work», which is certainly active, but hardly transitive:

In the context, the father is inspecting the ploughing done on his field. Dissatisfied, he draws the conclusion that his son must have been at work. The adverb tadz «thus» is suffixed with — s"o, marker of 3rd person singular definiteness and accusative, is also used in Komi as an emphatic particle, comparable to the Russian — to. The suffix — s"o marks definite objects, while indefinite ones remain unmarked:

In the following example, the construction can hardly be interpreted as evidential, conjecture or hearsay; it simply reports on the appearance of a person. The meaning of state becomes very clear due to v"oli:

In early fiction, there are some cases of the construction with intransitives:

The writer in question shows in his production a fairly strong influence of Russian, which is noticeable to Komi language specialists. Whether or not this possessive construction is connected with Russian dialects or not, Fedorov shows during his long career (from the 1930s to the 1990s) a growing predilection for its usage. In the early stories (1930—1950s, [Fedorov 1955], 282 pages) there are only four cases of the possessive impersonal, the one above included, whereas in the prose of the 1990s ([Fedorov 1989], 165 pages), there are 16 cases.

To native speakers, specialists in the Komi language, intransitive frequentative verbs with the suffix — vlare quite acceptable when the situation refers to a repeated action in the remote past. One informant states that the essence of the usage with the genitive is to stress that the time is over, the action cannot continue in the present situation. Another example from modem prose shows that this idea is preferably supported by the adverb n'in «already».

The context concerns the time after the revolution: a kulak asks a neighbour to come and see whether he really is a rich kulak, deserving punishment. The neighbour, who thinks that the speaker is an exploiter, gives the above answer. According to informants, he expresses his opinion that he had already visited the formerly wealthy man quite often enough. The common factor with the previous example is the finality of the situation: there will be no continuation. In this sense, the logically clearer resultativity inherent in the transitive constructions can be extended to intransitives. Figuratively speaking, the extent of the events is completed, the subject is not involved any more, and his past is an unchanging state now left behind.

Another case from modern prose shows an intransitive verb without the frequentative suffix. So far, only two cases of such constructions have been found, and one of them is rather doubtful. The first comes from the prose of G. Juskov, the most eminent living writer in Komi:

Mijan ta vyl"o i pet"oma ! — virdystlis s'injasnas

we-GEN this upon PTL come.out-PERF-3SG flash-PST-3SG eyes-INSTR

Baslykov. — Byr"odny okkupantjass"o!

Bashlykov destroy-INF occupiers-ACCDEF

The second example comes from the 1990s and actually represents a translation of a Russian text of a local Komi writer:

In the context, the relevant passage is concerned with the absence of the parents who had left a child alone at home. Out of seven informants, four have so far rejected this construction as a mistake, saying that the nominative form should be used instead:

Further two informants state that the verb form should be reflexive:

The seventh, a speaker of the Lower Vychegda dialect, feels that the genitive somehow creates a state and a distance better than the nominative. For instance, it would not be appropriate to continue talking about the father in the next sentence. For this speaker and the writer, the choice of the nominative probably signifies cancelling the prototypical feature of the nominative subject as a topic, shifting the agent into the background description. As the dialect of Lower Vychegda has for centuries been in contact with Russian settlers who spoke north Russian dialects, the genitive can be seen as a contact phenomenon.