Using Russian: A Guide to Contemporary Usage
D. Offord and N. Gogolitsyna
Cambridge University Press
2005
Pp. xxxiii + 493
ISBN-13 978-0-521-54761-1 (pbk)
ISBN-10 0-521-54761-X (pbk)

Reviewed by: Viktoria Driagina
University of Georgia

It is refreshing to find a grammar book which describes rather than prescribes and makes a consistent effort to familiarize readers with linguistic variation in terms of dialect, region, genre, style, and register. Of course, Offord and Gogolitsyna’s ambition for Using Russian: A Guide to Contemporary Usage (2005) goes far beyond treatment of grammar only. The authors make a welcome effort to introduce the contemporary Russian language in its historical, political, cultural, social and economical milieu. Offord and Gogolitsyna are to be commended for their attempt to raise readers’ awareness of the available linguistic choices – and the impact that such choices might have in different communicative situations.

This book is a second edition of Using Russian: A Guide to Contemporary Usage published by Offord in 1996. The new edition has been updated and expanded to include an impressive twelve chapters covering such topics as varieties of language and register, Russian words problematic for English-speaking learners, issues in translation from English into Russian, vocabulary and idioms, language and everyday life needs, verbal etiquette, word-formation, inflection, prepositions, syntax, and stress. Thus, the book addresses a range of linguistic and metalinguistic issues which, according to the promotional text on the cover, are of the most interest for the intermediate and advanced learners of Russian. It should be noted, however, that Using Russian does not provide a comprehensive coverage of Russian grammar and vocabulary, as only the topics that are deemed by the authors as particularly challenging for English-speaking learners of Russian receive attention in this volume. Some sections of the book highlight problematic areas in translation from English into Russian, and, therefore, will be appealing to professionals interested in issues of translation or interpreting.

The first two chapters offer an insightful discussion of the topics of language variation, register, and change. The authors effectively portray the dynamics of the transformative processes that characterize contemporary Russian society, including what is perceived by many linguists as the extreme Westernization and permissiveness of the language, and by others as the natural post-Soviet linguistic liberalization. Offord and Gogolitsyna choose not to pick sides in this ‘barbarization’ vs. ‘innovation’ battle: they objectively illustrate neologisms in the areas of lexis, grammatical standards, as well as novel variations in linguistic style and register. They discuss with some concern the question of what norms the learners of Russian should follow. While Offord and Gogolitsyna argue for a descriptive approach, their pedagogical beliefs appear to be quite conservative, if not hegemonic and stifling:

“[T]he foreign learner should understand that freedom that he or she enjoys to use the resources of the language being acquired, especially in the substandard forms, is on the whole more limited than that enjoyed by native speakers” (p. 26).

On the same page the authors warn students that “the disapproval of native speakers” can be “easily aroused” should the appropriate register be violated. They go on to underscore that the “foreigners” have a “duty” to “observe a certain humility and linguistic restraint” (ibid.) in their verbal etiquette. I am alarmed by this disempowering – and frankly outdated – message that Offord and Gogolitsyna send to language learners. It is ironic that a guide to contemporary usage would deny learners full liberty for expression of their personal meanings and intentionalities, even with the laudable intention of awareness-raising.

While Offord and Gogolitsyna report making use of on-line resources such as grammar websites and newspapers, Using Russian is not informed by corpus-based research, which is unfortunately still true for most guides and grammar books in any language (aside from a few notable exceptions, e.g. Cambridge Grammar of English by Carter & McCarthy (2006), The Cambridge Guide to English Usage by Rivers (2004)). This book, as the latest addition to the field, would be more convincing as a usage guide had it been informed by corpus analysis. Currently, the book is guided not by the actual usage data, but rather by the authors’ own judgments and traditionally prescribed rules. A remarkable exception is Chapter 2 on registers in which Offord and Gogolitsyna follow a data-driven inductive approach. They utilize excerpts from contemporary mass media, online chats, literary sources, academic and business documents to deduce characteristics of low, neutral and high registers in terms of grammar, syntax, vocabulary, phraseology, style, orthography, and pronunciation in case of oral transcripts. As a result, this chapter offers fascinating up-to-date material on registers in contemporary Russian that I have not encountered in other reference works.

Space constraints do not allow me to enumerate the merits of each individual chapter; however, I must note that I found Using Russian to be particularly helpful with structural issues such as flections, the formation of verbal forms and adjectives, case government, stress patterns, and, of course, the plethora of exceptions that plague such rules in Russian. The declensional and conjugational patterns accompanied by extensive lists of irregularities (Chapter 9) will certainly be popular among students at all levels of proficiency. The topic of stress (Chapter 12) is introduced in this edition of the book, and it makes an important and valuable addition to the volume. Stress patterns in Russian are notorious for their complexity, and the comprehensive treatment of the topic by Offord and Gogolitsyna will undoubtedly be appreciated by learners and instructors of Russian. This information is highly technical, i.e. hard to memorize and also hard to find as it is typically spread out through textbooks. The inclusion of these challenging issues makes Using Russian an excellent resource book.

Despite the general high quality of the publication, not all the chapters in the book are of equal worth and depth. This is, however, almost inevitable for such an ambitious volume as this one, including topics such as traditional grammar and syntax, but also variation, phraseology, vulgarities, jokes, pragmatics, proverbs, stress and everyday trivia among others. Some phenomena are discussed too superficially to be of any benefit for intermediate and advance students, i.e. the target audience for the volume. I am particularly disappointed by the quality and the tone of the chapter on verbal etiquette (Chapter 7). Although the approach appears to be functional (the subtopics include Greetings, Introductions, Farewells, Wishing, Apologizing, Requests, etc.), the content of the chapter is similar to that of a phrase book and is more appropriate for beginners rather than for the advanced learner “striving for a more comprehensive and sophisticated knowledge” (ibid, p. xiii). Unfortunately, Using Russian itself lacks sophistication in presenting speech acts: it does not alert readers to the pragmatic nuances that the listed choices may convey. The authors seem unaware of the fact that some of the suggested options may sound offensive, out-of-date, or inappropriate in modern Russian (e.g. Tak i byt’ “= Fine” as a response to an apology, Vy l’stite mne “You are flattering me” in response to a compliment, and Mne zhal’ tebia / vas “I pity you” as a reassurance).

I have similar concerns about the presentation of such pedagogically key areas of Russian grammar as motion verbs and aspect. Both topics are semantically and structurally complex and take a central place in typical Russian as a foreign language curricula but are addressed only superficially in Using Russian. The section on motion verbs receives less than two pages, and the explanation about the unidirectional vs. multidirectional distinction is quite deficient:

The easiest way to grasp the distinction between the verbs in the two categories is perhaps to treat those like idti as having quite specific meaning and those like khodit’, on the contrary, as covering a broader range of meanings outside of the scope of those like idti (ibid, p. 413).

Prefixed verbs of motion are not introduced at all, although they are much more frequent than unprefixed ones and structurally the former present a formidable challenge worth tackling by a reference grammar for the advanced learner. The chapter on aspect is also of introductory nature and offers hackneyed and misleading rules of thumb: e.g., adverbial modifiers per se do not “dictate” or “encourage” the use of the perfective or the imperfective, as the authors suggest in Chapter 11. All of these comments are relevant to the issue discussed in the beginning of the review: Using Russian and many other reference books are not informed by the authentic usage data; hence the artificial examples and misguided rules which make their way past the authors’ judgments even into the publications of the highest quality.