Бросив начатые эксперименты,...

[freiburg234.livejournal.com]

Dear Community,

Could you please provide your input regarding the following?

... , мой приятель совершенно неожиданно отказался от работы.
1. Бросая начатые эксперименты
2. Бросив начатые эксперименты
3. Бросавший начатые эксперименты
4. Бросающий начатые эксперименты


Which of the above is correct. Why is it correct and why are the others incorrect?

Thank you for your inut.

ФБ

Comments

[towarysc.livejournal.com]

1. Giving up (meaning 'while giving up')
2. Having given up - correct (if i remember this form in english right)
3. Giving up (meanig 'my friend, who was giving up...')
4. Giving up (meanig 'my friend, who is giving up...')

[freiburg234.livejournal.com]

Thank you. That's a great explanation. And your English is perfect.

[salexey.livejournal.com]

"Бросавший начатые эксперименты" can also mean "who had given up a lot of times", not only "who was giving up".

[scolar.livejournal.com]

Well, this test requires understanding the semantics, not only the grammar.

Let's remove "совершенно неожиданно" for a second. In this case all four sentences are correct:

"1. Бросая начатые эксперименты, мой приятель отказался от работы." - that means that the job is one of my buddy's life experiments, he is now changing his life, that's why he has left the job.

"2. Бросив начатые эксперименты, мой приятель отказался от работы." - in that case experiments are part of his work, they were left unfinished.

"3. Бросавший начатые эксперименты, мой приятель отказался от работы." - ugly, but can be read as "мой приятель, склонный [в то время] бросать начатые эксперименты, отказался от работы". In the past my buddy had been tending to leave things incomplete, that's why he left the job.

"4. Бросающий начатые эксперименты, мой приятель отказался от работы." - the same as #3, with the only difference - it's about the present time: my buddy tends to leave things incomplete, that's explain why he has left his job.

Now let's return to the original test: words "совершенно неожиданно" mean, that the actor ("мой приятель") does not have a tendency to leave things incomplete. All except #2 become incorrect.

[archaicos.livejournal.com]

Likewise, could you tell us what you thought yourself, which choices you were considering and why?

Seamless vs. Discrete Events

[freiburg234.livejournal.com]

I knew it had to be 1. or 2., as I suspected we were looking for a verbal adverb (gerund)
- бросая or бросив - and not a participle - бросающий or бросавший.

Predictably, I, too, locked in on the semantical aspect of the problem, i.e. совершенно неожиданно. However, my resulting analysis was not as comprehensive as that by "scolar", as I never thought to have considered using a participle here, with or without совершенно неожиданно.

What influenced me about совершенно неожиданно is that it caused me to lean toward the imperfective бросая, i.e. "Giving up the experiments, my friend very unexpectedly quit his job." To me, the idea up of suddenly quitting the job creates the impression of a seamlessness of events. For example, "Getting up from his chair, he reached over to punch his opponent". In English, one does not necessarily see the imperfective" 'getting up' as "while" (i.e. While getting up from his chair,....) Rather, as in the above example, it can be used to illustrate how events take place seemingly seamlessly.

It seems to me from the explanations given the Russian interpretation focuses strictly on the idea of discrete events without the aspect of a seamless flow, which is apparenty why the solution here must be perfective "бросив".