PASSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS IN MODERN RUSSIAN: FORM AND FUNCTION

Abstract

Passive constructions in Modern Russian exhibit a complex interplay between morphological, syntactic and communicative factors. While the traditional opposition between the analytic быть + Participle II and the synthetic short participle remains central, recent corpus‐based studies reveal a dynamic redistribution of functions driven by information structure, genre conventions and pragmatic nuance. This article investigates the formal types and functional load of Russian passives in a 25-million-word balanced corpus drawn from the Russian National Corpus (RNC) and the Integrum media archive. Using mixed quantitative-qualitative methods, we show that analytic passives increasingly dominate in journalistic and academic prose, serving to highlight theme–rheme progression and attenuate agency, whereas short-form passives concentrate in narrative segments with fixed word order and topic continuity. The findings refine existing descriptions by demonstrating how prosodic, aspectual and stylistic parameters converge to motivate passive choice.