| The primary topic of this work is the effect that indeclinable and other non-declined nominals, which over the past century have inundated the Russian language, are exerting on its grammatical system. Based on these findings, we have also investigated the broader theoretical issue of whether Russian is in the process of changing from a synthetic to an analytic language.; The work begins with a formal classification of the various types of indeclinable and non-declined nominals which occur in Russian. These include foreign borrowings which end in non-systemic terminal phonemes, abbreviations, acronyms, stump compounds, certain proper nouns, numerals, words perceived as foreign, words spelled with Latin characters, indeclinable adjectives, and appositives.; Next we survey how various linguists have classified languages typologically over the past two centuries, in order to precisely define the terms "synthetic" and "analytic" as they are used in this work---i.e. synthetic languages express grammatical relationships morphologically, while analytic languages express grammatical relationships syntactically.; This is followed by a brief linguistic history of Bulgarian, focusing on the process it underwent in changing from a synthetic to an analytic language, which enables us to posit various linguistic and cultural impulses which cause languages to change.; The next section looks at certain aspects of the history of the Russian language, pointing out where its traditional synthetic structure has been eroded over the centuries, and how the influence of analytic modes for expressing grammatical relationships is growing. We follow this with the results of our research project, in which we analyzed a corpus of 40,000 words to ascertain through statistical analysis how the Russian language marks grammatical relationships in respect to indeclinable and non-declined words.; The work concludes with the proposal that, because Russian is increasingly adopting analytic means for expressing grammatical relationships, two intermingling grammatical systems are now operating in the Russian language speech community. Over time this should result in Russian changing into an analytic language.; In closing, we elucidate a broad overview of the process by which languages undergo radical transformation in their linguistic systems, and offer suggestions for further research. |
