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Viviana Ortiz
How is the structure to make a sentence in the present tense in russian?
In english the structure is: subject + verb ( present tense ) + complement
in russian, is the structure similar or how does it works?
May 15, 2015 5:02 PM
Answers · 7
8
The key word in the previous answer is "can". English is a Subject prominent language with the SVO word order, while Russian is both subject-prominent and topic-prominent. What does this practically mean?
1. SVO structure (Subject + Verb + everything else) is fine: Вивиана задала вопрос. Here you simply state the fact.
2. VSO is fine: Задала Вивиана вопрос. Nothing wrong with this. A bit more colloquial rather than descriptive and factual.
3. OVS - Вопрос задала Вивиана. Here we put all the emphasis on the subject. It's Viviana who asked the question Not anyone else. However, you may change the intonation and put the emphasis on the first word. Then it would mean that Viviana had a question, not anything, but a question.
4. OSV - Вопрос Вивиана задала. Again, depending on the intonation, you say either that Vivana dared to ask a question (Yes, she did it!) or that she asked the question, not something else, but this question.
As you see, word order in the Russian language is flexible, and it changes depending on the communicative task, This is a feature of the topic-prominent languages.
So when constructing a sentence in Russian, the right question to ask yourself is not "is this word order correct?" but "what's the difference between this sentence and the one with the reverse word order".
I hope it helped. Good luck! :)
May 15, 2015
2
You can use the same structure in Russian as well:
Subject (Подлежащее) + Verb (present tense) (Сказуемое - глагол в настоящем времени) + complement (дополнение)
May 15, 2015
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Viviana Ortiz
Language Skills
English, Russian, Spanish
Learning Language
English, Russian
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