Russian Grammar
Russian grammar encompasses:- a highly synthetic morphology
- a syntax that, for the literary language, is the conscious fusion of three elements: a Church Slavonic inheritance; a Western European style; a polished vernacular foundation. The Russian grammar has the following characteristics:
-There are three persons, two numbers (singular and plural), though there was dual number in Old Russian
-There are three genders: masculine, feminine and neutral
-There is no article
-Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals, participles do decline
-There are 6 cases: Nominative, Genitive (the so-called Genitive-II is used with some nouns), Dative, Accusative, Instrumental and Prepositional (Prepositional-II is used with some nouns, though not with the same ones as Genitive-II) (Russian lacks Vocative case which is present in Ukrainian and in many other Slavic languages).
-There are 3 classes of noun declension
-Adjectives decline according to case, gender and number and agree with nouns in case, gender and number
-There are short adjectives that do not decline
-Verbs conjugate according to person, number, tense, voice and mood
-There are two classes of conjugation, 3 tenses (Past, Present and Future) and 3 moods (Indicative, Subjunctive and Imperative)
-Verbs have two aspects: Imperfective and Perfective, similar to English Present and Perfect infinitives, e.g. to do - to have done, to go - to have gone, but these two forms in Russian both consist of one word.
-Participles exist in 4 forms: Present Active, Past Active, Present Passive and Past Passive
-There are short participles corresponding to two Passive forms of regular participles that like short adjectives do not decline
-There are adverbial participles that do not decline and exist in Present and Past forms
-Word order is free, moreover, by changing the word order any word in a sentence can be emphasized