Russian Function Words: Meanings and Use

Marina Rojavin is teaching at Bryn Mawr College. She specializes in Russian language and culture, Soviet film and, in particular, character archetypes in Soviet cinema of the 1960s–1980s; Russian media studies; Russian intellectuals in Imperial Russia; and the Russian intelligentsia. Marina has published articles on the semantic category of gender in Russian and Ukrainian and on the grammatical category of gender in Russian. She and Allan Reid published A Guide to Russian Words and Expressions that Cause Difficulties in 2004. Her most recent publications are the textbook Russian for Advanced Students (2013), completed with her colleagues, and the volume Women in Soviet Film: The Thaw and Post-Thaw Periods (2017), edited together with Timothy Harte (Bryn Mawr College). Alexander Rojavin is currently in law school. A native speaker of English and Russian, he has focused his undergraduate and graduate studies on Soviet and post-Soviet media space, producing a master’s thesis on media ownership in Ukraine and on the legal framework within which the Ukrainian media operate. Alexander helped translate a series of theater treatises for Nikolai Demidov: Becoming an Actor-Creator (2016). He has also translated a series of contemporary Russian plays (forthcoming) and a work of creative nonfiction by Yevsey Tseytlin, Long Conversations in Anticipation of a Joyous Death, which grapples with the history and fate of Lithuania’s Jewry (2018).

"a useful reference for undergraduate students in communication-centered courses, advanced students and instructors who need to provide their students quick explanations and examples of function word usage. The selection of entries is comprehensive without being overwhelming: it includes most commonly used prepositions, conjunctions, particles, interjections, and parenthetical words across a range of registers and styles, from highly colloquial to academic and literary."- Evelina Mendelevich, Russian Language Journal, Vol 69, 2019

• IntroductionAbbreviations TerminologyEnglish-Russian GlossaryRussian-English GlossaryEntries Bibliography