Modern theories of Russian syntax

Question

Western linguistics seems to be dominated by the Chomskian transformational generative grammar and its offshoots. My attempts to familiarize myself with these theories however always leave me under the impression that they were designed "by English speakers for description of their native English" - that is they might be not optimal for describing Russian. (Although this may be more due to the fact that the books/reviews are written for the English-speaking audience.)

I will appreciate comments on this subject. More specifically:

• Are transformational generative syntax theories popular among Russian linguists?
• Do these theories encounter specific problems when treating Russian and related languages? What kind of problems?
• What are the alternative theories? Are there any created by Russian-speaking linguists (or native speakers of Slavic languages)?

Answer 1

Sebastian Shaumyan proposed an order-free theory of syntax which has some currency in the U.S. However, I don't know whether Shaumyan's work was the historical source of the Western versions. I heard him lecture at the 1969 Linguistic Summer Institute at Ohio State. I think he wrote in Russian, though he was Armenian. A version of the order-free theory was made part of the GPSG theory from the '80s, where the idea was formalized by giving phrase structure rules in sets having right-hand sides with symbols occurring in all possible orders. There were ordering rules eliminating those rules specifying orders inconsistent with the facts of a given language.

This idea could be integrated into TG grammar easily enough, if someone wanted to do that, since the base component of a TG is a phrase structure grammar.

I should also mention the Russian linguist N. S. Trubetzkoy whose work was very influential in the early development of generative phonology.