How does Russian sentence structure differ from English

Russian sentence structure differs from English primarily in its flexibility of word order, the use of inflections, and the way subjects, verbs, and objects are organized.

1. Word Order:

• English typically follows a strict Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) order, for example, “She reads a book.”
• Russian, by contrast, has a more flexible word order due to its rich inflectional system. The typical order is also SVO, but variations like SOV, VSO, etc., are common without loss of meaning because grammatical roles are indicated by word endings (cases) rather than position. ^{5, 14}

2. Cases and Inflections:

• Russian uses cases to mark the grammatical roles of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, allowing sentence elements to be reordered more freely. English relies more on word order and prepositions to express these relationships. ^{14, 5}

3. Subject and Predicate Emphasis:

• Russian often employs stylistic inversion and different syntactic constructions to emphasize parts of the sentence, which happens less frequently and less flexibly in English. ⁵

4. Copular Sentences and Definitional Structures:

• Russian often uses structures like “NP1 – èto NP2” (NP1 is NP2) to express identity relations, which differ somewhat from English copular sentence structures. ^{1, 18}

In summary, Russian sentence structure is more flexible than English due to grammatical cases and inflections that indicate the relationships between sentence parts, while English follows a more fixed word order to convey meaning. This leads to differences in how sentences are constructed and how emphasis is achieved in both languages. ^{18, 14, 5}

References

• Predication and Equation in Copular Sentences: Russian vs. English

• THE PROBLEM OF CATEGORIZATION OF THE WORLD AT THE INITIAL STAGE OF THE LANGAUGE DEVELOPMENT (within the Framework of the Salishan Language Squamish)

• [Prague Linguistic Circle papers = Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague : n.s.][3]

• Peculiarities of conveying logical inferences when translating an English simple sentence into Russian

• Foregrounding of the principal parts of the sentence by means of stylistic inversion in Russian, Chuvash and English: A comparative analysis

• A comparative analysis of syntactic complexity in argumentative essays from rhetorical perspective: ChatGPT vs. English native speakers

• English and Russian proverbs about fate, predestination and human responsibility for one’s destiny in terms of their meanings, structural and semantic characteristics, figurative structure, expressiveness and cultural identity

• English tough-constructions and their analogues in French and Russian

• The History of Formation of Theoretical and Methodological Foundations of the Constructive Analysis of the English Sentence’s Structure

• Language units of subject semantics as an actualizer of the verbal and cogitative category of situationality in the Russian and English languages

• Comparative Study of English and Russian Phraseology: Component Theory of Identity and Difference of the Seme Organization

• Specificational Copular Sentences in Russian and English

• Vocatives and Other Direct Address Forms: A Contrastive Study

• Russian English and what it is not

• English and Russian Genitive Alternations: A Study in Construction Typology

• Complement Tense in Contrast: The SOT parameter in Russian and English

• Aspect in English and Russian flashback discourses

• Russian definitional generic sentences

• Morphological Peculiarities of Lexical Units of English Origin in Contemporary Russian Slang: Dictionary and Corpus Analyses

• The syntactic complexity of Russian relative clauses

[3]: https://benjamins.com/ catalog/plcp