Systemic relations of constructions with the conjunction chtoby ‘to’

Galina Kustova
Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract: The paper discusses constructions with the conjunction chtoby ‘to’. Formal and semantic relations between different types of chtoby-clauses subordinate to a noun are analyzed. Several semantic classes of nouns are contrasted: (1) abstract nouns: (a) sluchai ‘case’, pretsedent ‘precedent’, primer ‘example’, fakt ‘fact’, istoriya ‘history’, situatsiya ‘situation’, (b) povod ‘occasion’, osnovanie ‘reason’, etc., cf.: No v tridtsatiletnei praktike bukhgaltera ne bylo sluchaya, chtoby kto-nibud' /…/ zatrudnyalsya by prinyat' den'gi [M.A. Bulgakov] ‘But there had been no case in the bookkeeper's thirty years of experience when anyone /…/ had had a hard rime accepting money’; (2) concrete functional nouns denoting (a) an object: U nego s soboi vsegda byla igolka s nitkoi, chtoby pugovitsy prishivat' ‘He always had a needle and thread with him to sew on buttons’; (b) a person: U nego est' povar, chtoby gotovit' ‘He has a chef to cook’. The article argues that the systemic connections between argument and circumstantial chtoby-clauses are determined by similar components in the semantic structure of sentences.

Keywords: constructions, conjunction chtoby ‘to’, argument clauses, circumstantial clauses, abstract nouns, concrete functional nouns

For citation: Kustova G. Systemic relations of constructions with the conjunction chtoby ‘to’. Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters. 2023. Vol. 6, iss. 2. Pp. 52–72. (In Rus.) doi:10.37632/PI.2023.27.79.003