MTEL Russian key terms

A grammatical category of Russian nouns, pronouns, and adjectives that marks their syntactic role; Russian has six: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and prepositional.

The default dictionary form of a Russian word, used for the subject of a sentence and for the citation form in dictionaries and vocabulary lists.

The case expressing possession, absence, quantity, and origin, and required after many prepositions and numerals; often called the genitive case in English grammars.

The case marking the direct object of a transitive verb and the object of motion prepositions such as в and на; its form often coincides with the nominative or genitive.

The case used only after prepositions, chiefly for location (в, на) and topic (о, об), and named for that prepositional dependence.

The Russian verbal category distinguishing completed, bounded actions from ongoing or repeated ones; every verb is either perfective or imperfective, and the pair shapes tense usage.

The verb aspect presenting an action as a complete whole with a result or boundary; it has no present tense and forms only past and future.

The verb aspect presenting an action as ongoing, habitual, or repeated without focus on its endpoint; it has all three tenses and combines with phase verbs.

A verb of motion such as идти or ехать, which forms unidirectional and multidirectional pairs and takes distinct prepositions depending on the means of travel.

A morpheme attached before a root that modifies meaning, often creating a perfective partner of an imperfective verb or changing direction and result.

A morpheme added after a root or stem that changes word meaning or grammatical class, such as forming nouns from verbs or comparative adjectives.

The final, changeable morpheme of a Russian word that carries case, number, and gender or person information and links the word to other sentence parts.

The set of patterns by which nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and numerals change endings for case and number; Russian nouns are grouped into three main declension classes.

The pattern of verb ending changes for person and number in the present or future tense; Russian verbs fall into two main conjugations.

The grammatical subject of a sentence, with which the predicate agrees in person and number; it appears in the nominative case unless the sentence is impersonal.

The predicate of a sentence, expressing what is said about the subject; it may be a simple verb, a compound verb, or a copula with a noun or adjective.

A verb that takes a direct object in the accusative case without a preposition; its opposite, an intransitive verb, cannot take such an object.

An uninflected function word that governs the case of the following noun phrase and expresses relations of place, time, cause, or purpose.

A linking verb such as быть that joins subject and predicate nominative; in the Russian present tense it is normally omitted and replaced by a dash.

A punctuation dash placed between subject and predicate when both are nouns or infinitives and no copula appears, as in Москва - столица.

The system of Russian punctuation marks and their rules, including the frequent comma before subordinate clauses and around participial and adverbial phrases.

A participial phrase modifying a noun; in Russian it is set off by commas when it follows the noun it modifies.

A verbal adjective formed from a verb stem that agrees with its noun in gender, number, and case while retaining tense and aspect meaning.

An indeclinable verbal adverb expressing a secondary action performed by the same subject as the main verb; it corresponds to English -ing clauses.

The placement of stress on one syllable of a Russian word; it is mobile across inflectional forms and can distinguish otherwise identical words.

The weakening of unstressed vowels, especially the reduction of о to an a-like sound and of е to a shorter sound in unstressed syllables.

The standard Russian pronunciation pattern in which unstressed о is pronounced like а, so молоко sounds close to малако in the literary norm.

The hard sign ъ, written after a prefix before a yotated vowel to keep the consonant hard and separate it from the following vowel sound.

The soft sign ь, which does not represent a sound itself but marks the preceding consonant as palatalized or signals a grammatical category such as feminine gender.

The secondary articulation in which a consonant is pronounced with the tongue raised toward the hard palate, written in Russian with a following soft sign or yotated vowel.

One of the vowels е, ё, ю, я, which represent a y sound plus a vowel at the start of a word or after a vowel or sign.

One of two words spelled identically but stressed or pronounced differently, such as замок (castle) and замок (lock).

A word identical in spelling and sound to another but unrelated in meaning, as with коса for a braid, a scythe, or a sandbar.

A word with a meaning close to another's but differing in nuance, style, or collocation, such as смотреть and глядеть for looking.

A word expressing the opposite meaning of another, such as высокий and низкий, often used in lexical exercises and vocabulary questions.

A fixed idiomatic expression whose meaning cannot be derived from its parts, such as бить баклуши for idling.

A short traditional saying stating a general truth or piece of folk wisdom, used in Russian culture and often tested for meaning and context.

A noun naming the person addressed, set off by commas and in the nominative case, as in Здравствуй, Анна!

The part of speech expressing number or order, whose case government affects the form of the following noun, as with пять книг versus пять книг in oblique cases.