# Пришло два сообщения



## ShakeyX

Was just doing some Russian on duolingo and came across this sentence.

I understand it as "you got/received two messages"

I just wondered what "пришло" was conjugating to.

We see in passive sentences like "I was given" the verb conjugating in the 3rd person plural (мне дали - I was given by them [они]) much like "меня зовут".

So I am wondering why we dont see "пришли" here as it was 2 message that came.


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## Rosett

"пришло" assumes something like English "it" in the given example.
But you can say "пришли," as well.


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## Maroseika

ShakeyX said:


> So I am wondering why we dont see "пришли" here as it was 2 message that came.



There are two ways to say this: with impersonal verb (= Single Neuter) and with persnal verb (=Plural 3rd person). In general, personal form is mostly used when the subjects behave or are considered to behave independently, cf.:

В комнату вошло три человека. (They came in as one single group, we don't care of their individuality).
В комнату вошли три человека. (We consider them as individuals).

Мне пришло два письма со счетами. (The letters are of one kind - just bills).
Мне пришли два письма - одно от мамы, другое от жены. (The letters obtain some kind of individuality).

Of course, this distinction is rather subtle and is often neglected in the live speech. However when talking about featureless objects like letters or messages, on default form seems to be impersonal, at least until we get to know something special about them.


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## Sobakus

I'm wondering now, is the noun in the impersonal construction formally considered the subject or part of a compound predicate? Grammatically it's certainly the latter.



ShakeyX said:


> We see in passive sentences like "I was given" the verb conjugating in the 3rd person plural (мне дали - I was given by them [они]) much like "меня зовут".


This is different – a passive sentence still has a subject, even if indefinite: «[не́кие они́] мне присла́ли два сообще́ния».


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## Maroseika

Sobakus said:


> I'm wondering now, is the noun in the impersonal construction formally considered the subject or part of a compound predicate? Grammatically it's certainly the latter.


What's the subject then? I think the subject is два сообщения.


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## Sobakus

Maroseika said:


> What's the subject then? I think the subject is два сообщения.


Judging by the verb form it has to be an omitted neuter pronoun, the same as in «было поздно». My knowledge of formal grammar is too poor to explain it, but this can be demonstrated with a similar German construction. In Russian, the logical subject can't be dropped (пять человек постучало в дверь -> *в дверь постучало), but in German it can (Es hat [durch jemanden] an der Tür geklopft). I would describe it as a zero-subject construction.


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## Maroseika

In our case subject presense is quite evident, we can clearly point to the actor - два сообщения. No difference from пять человек постучало.
But I can see the difference between Пять человек постучало в дверь and В дверь постучали (impersonal). And very big difference from impersonal Было поздно.

More details in par. 184 here (Сказуемое при подлежащем – количественно-именном сочетании (счетном обороте))


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## Sobakus

Yes, certainly the logical subject is present and obvious. I was simply curious how the lack of verbal agreement with either the agens (Active) or patiens (Passive) is explained by Russian grammarians. To bring up German again, there there's no grammatical difference between "es regnete" (букв. "оно дождило") and "es klopfte an der Tür" (букв. "оно (по)стучало в дверь"). I'm pretty sure in terms of universal grammar the two in both languages are described by the same formula, only in Russian the agent must be present and is expressed by the Nominative rather than by _durch Acc_, while German has to explicitly include the dummy subject _es_ that's always omitted, but still causes the verb to agree with it, in Russian.


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## Maroseika

I think there is no _"es" _in Russian phrases, just quantitative-nominal combination may be understood as "genderless" actor, when the context doesn't presume personofication.. But it's not dummy, it's quite real. Neuter gender is used here as generalizer, just like in Это плохо.


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## Sobakus

Then we would have to assume that in Russian the predicate can take an arbitrary gender and number independent of its subject, wouldn't we? But by considering a collective noun such as _детвора_ we can clearly see that even if the word refers to a group of non-personified individuals of unspecified gender, the predicate can't stand in any form other than the Fem.Sg. dictated by the subject.


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## Maroseika

Детвора is morphologically feminine, so no space for ambiguity. But what is the gender of "два сообщения"? Or what's the gender of "три"?


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## Sobakus

Maroseika said:


> Детвора is morphologically feminine, so no space for ambiguity. But what is the gender of "два сообщения"? Or what's the gender of "три"?


_ Два сообщения _is masculine, of course – and, incidentally, this numeral is the only word in Russian retaining the gender distinction in the plural. _Три_ has no gender distinction, but the noun that it modifies certainly has gender, and, most importantly, being an ordinal numeral, it requires the predicate it agrees with to be in the plural. The discussed construction simply lacks this agreement, instead, the agreement is with the implied dummy pronoun. Unless we describe Russian as a language requiring no subject-predicate agreement, there has to be some subject that the predicate agrees with. So for simplicity, in such cases traditional grammar posits the logical, and not grammatical subject as being the subject of the sentence.


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## Maroseika

Sobakus said:


> _ Два сообщения _is masculine, of course


I'm afraid I cannot agree, because два сообщения never agrees as a whole in Masculine with anything (being Plural by nature).  In this sense it differs from the noun+noun combinations, with one main and one subordinate word, which agrees in gender according to the main word. 
When considered individually, numeral+noun behaves like Plural noun+noun: два сообщения пришли; мешки с картошкой рассыпались. But the difference becomes apparent when we take it impersonally: Два сообщения пришло.



> – and, incidentally, this numeral is the only word in Russian retaining the gender distinction in the plural.


But even when dealing with separate word два, we cannot say whether it is Masculine or Neuter. But anyway it doesn't matter anymore once we come to the word combination numeral + noun.


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## Sobakus

Ok, your parallel with noun+noun was useful, I now see the source of the whole mess: it's the loss of the Dual again! 

For Slovene:


TriglavNationalPark said:


> 1 - nominative singular, the verb is in singular
> 2 - nominative dual, the verb is in dual
> 3, 4 - nominative plural, the verb is in plural
> 5 - 100 genitive plural, the verb is in singular



The singular agreement is actually with the former nominal collective numerals in _-ь_ (that were neuter) turned ordinal, extended to 2-4 as well. The main noun is then subordinate in this construction, so its gender and number is irrelevant. Therefore, the numeral alone is the grammatical subject with both types of agreement. This also explains why the Neut.Sg. agreement is more likely to be used with the original neuter numerals 5 and up and the Pl. agreement with 2-4, especially with feminine nouns.


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## Maroseika

Sobakus said:


> The singular agreement is actually with the former nominal collective numerals in _-ь_ (that were neuter) turned ordinal, extended to 2-4 as well. The main noun is then subordinate in this construction, so its gender and number is irrelevant. Therefore, the numeral alone is the grammatical subject with both types of agreement. This also explains why the Neut.Sg. agreement is more likely to be used with the original neuter numerals 5 and up and the Pl. agreement with 2-4, especially with feminine nouns.


I would rather say this is just because the more is the number, the more difficult is personalization.
However it seems to me, that in the phrases like Пришли два сообщения the role of personal/impersonal attitude is much more important than the remnants of archaic Dual or anything like that:
Пришли пять писем: от мамы, папы, бабушки, брата и от любимой девушки.
Vs
На прошлой неделе пришло шесть писем, а на этой - только два.


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## Sobakus

Maroseika said:


> I would rather say this is just because the more is the number, the more difficult is personalization.


But the point is that the individualisation distinction is secondary, while a fixed case depending on the numeral is (was) primary, so the former must be explained from the latter. But then the very change to collective numerals only for 5+ must have been due to the easier impersonalisation of them. I'm not arguing that the main factor in the choice of agreement is individualisation. By the way, I now have doubts about my remark concerning the feminine.


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## Maroseika

_*Moderatorial:*_

_*Discussion about collective numbers is moved to the new thread "Пятеро человек пришло/пришли". 
Please stick to the thread topic.*_


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