Scary-Good Grammar. Unpacking the Urban Legend and the Spooky Story

Names and identifying details of every student here are changed, as they are everywhere on the blog.

The story I could not have told twice

I put 12-year-olds to the test with a request: retell in Russian, in 4 sentences, any story they had heard from another.

What I got back was 4 sentences of direct speech. He said, «I saw it,» she said, «it was there.» They put on a little play of it instead of simply telling me what was said.

Why I chalked it up to a vocabulary issue

When a child is unable to report another’s words he will act them out, and that is what gives the retelling an air of untruth.

For some time I considered it a deficiency in connectives. Lacking as if (budto) I would teach it; no that (chto) after a verb of speech and I would drill it. The drills were effective within themselves but did not go an inch beyond, something I observed and left alone for most of a year.

What I had not seen was that reported speech is not a word. It is a clause within a clause and the word order in those does shift when English is the majority language. Zuban and colleagues have shown heritage speakers in the US to be more prone to an English-like order in their embedded clauses than monolinguals. Heritage speakers in Germany were not, and main clauses in every group are as one would expect.

Then there is the matter of formality. Martynova and her team found in their data that this is what prompts the use of embedded clauses Above all else. Their speakers will produce far more of them in formal settings than in informal ones, and this holds true for every group they have tested.

This puts a difficult twist on a ghost story. The genre is informal in its very nature, yet the structure it is built on is exactly what informal talk puts down.

The requirements of reported speech

Three patterns will do for nearly any retelling and a child with them can pass on anything he has been told. One is already there, the other two are the work. Third is the pattern that allows for a legend. With They say that you are saying somebody put it to you and you are putting it to me without vouching for it; there is no single word in English to make the same point.

A legend that no one will stand behind is one that endures.

That is the whole of the genre and why these stories outlast their originators by decades. You cannot hold someone to account for what he never said he saw.

An example for a lesson

Here is one I have written for a lesson from the common motifs that seem to be in every version of this tale. It is not taken from anyone, the sentences are my own.

It is said that a light burns in the old house at the edge of the city at night. A neighbor said she had seen it many times. She asked the mailman who lives there, and the mailman replied that the house has been empty for 20 years now. No one now passes by after sunset.

Govoryat, budto in the old house on the outskirts of the city, the world will be lit up for a while. The neighbor said she had seen him many times. She asked around who lived there, and the neighbor replied that the house had been empty for 20 years. No one would even go by without permission.

They say a light goes on at night in the old house on the edge of town. The neighbor said she had seen it many times. She asked the postman who lived there and he said the place has been empty for 20 years. Nobody passes by after sunset now.

It consists of 4 sentences, 3 of which are someone passing along the words of another. There is no action in the piece. No one enters the house or comes to any harm or finds anything. The whole thing is an effect of people repeating each other, none of whom were present.

Turning direct into reported speech

If you read it out loud and count the voices, not one is from a person who was there.

In Russian this is more straightforward than in English and one should tell a child as much. In English the tense is reversed: I saw it turns into he said he had seen it. Not so in Russian. I saw him (ya videla yego) is rendered she said that she saw him (ona skazala, chto videla yego), the verb is left as is.

The person is what changes and that is where retellings can go wrong. Я becomes She, mine becomes her. A child who forgets to make the change will inadvertently have the whole story happen to him or her.

With questions the mark is dropped but the order remains. Who lives there? (Who lives there?) is she asked who lived there (She asked who was there). But no inversion, no auxiliary of any kind. Only with a yes-or-no query does Russian put in a leaf (li): Is anyone living there? (Is there anyone alive?) becomes she asked if anyone lived there (she asked, is anyone there?).

What made it stick

We gave up on drilling and took to gossiping. Each lesson began with 2 minutes of sharing what they had heard—not stories, but rumors about homework, a teacher not showing up, or something said in the hall.

For weeks it didn't go well. They would fall back on direct speech and I let it pass without making a correction, which was harder work than correcting and for a while felt like inaction.

Then a girl came along who wished to repeat something without taking the blame for it. She made use of They say that of her own accord for the distance it gives and the construction was no longer just an exercise. My ghost story followed and was simple in comparison since she knew how to present what she had not seen with her own eyes. The grammar was in place before the assignment called for it. At Palme School we teach children online, in groups of up to eight, two forty-minute classes a week, and the first two lessons are free. Both courses above take bookings the same way, and the printable material is free whether or not you ever book anything.

Frequently asked questions

What does говорят, будто (govoryat, budto) mean?

They say that, with the source unnamed and the speaker not vouching for it. English has no single phrase that carries the same distance.

Do Russian shift tenses in reported speech the way English does?

No. The verb stays as it was; only the person changes. I saw him (ya videla yego) becomes she said that she saw him (she said she saw him), not she said that she had seen him.

Why does my child act out stories instead of reporting them?

Not because the structure is missing. It was found that heritage speakers and monolingual speakers produced embedded clauses at similar rates. What the same study did find is that everyone, in every group, produces far fewer of them in informal situations, and a ghost story is as informal as talk gets. Direct speech is the path of least resistance, not the only available path.

For what age is this intended?

Around B1 to B2, which in practice means 11 and up. Younger children can do the first pattern and leave the question version for later.

Sources

• Martynova, M., Zuban, Y., Gagarina, N., & Szucsich, L. (2024). Use of embedded clauses in heritage and monolingual Russian. Languages, 9(5), 157. doi.org
• Zuban, Y., Martynova, M., Zerbian, S., Szucsich, L., & Gagarina, N. (2021). Word order in heritage Russian: Clause type and majority language matter. Russian Linguistics, 45, 253. doi.org

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Lily Rozberg has been teaching for sixteen years, first English in Russia and now Russian to bilingual children across the US and Canada. She writes for Palme School about heritage language, reading, and the things report cards do not measure.