Breakdown of Завод прекратил работу в мае.
работа
work, job
завод
factory
май
May
прекратить
to put an end to, to stop
Questions & Answers about Завод прекратил работу в мае.
The lesson is about phase verbs followed by an imperfective infinitive, but here we have the noun работу. How does that work?
While phase verbs like прекратить (to cease) and закончить (to finish) are often followed by an imperfective infinitive to mean stopping an action, they can also simply take a direct object noun in the accusative case. Instead of saying the factory stopped "working" (verb), this sentence says it stopped "its work" or "operations" (работу).
Why use прекратил here instead of закончил?
The verb закончить implies finishing or completing a task naturally. Прекратить, however, means to cease, halt, or terminate an activity, often abruptly or before a natural conclusion. A factory permanently or suddenly shutting down fits прекратить perfectly.
Why is the perfective verb прекратил used when the factory's work was an ongoing process?
The perfective aspect is used because the act of ceasing operations was a single, completed event that happened in May. Even though the factory's work was continuous before that, the "stopping" itself is treated as a finished result.
I remember months take the preposition в, but why does май become мае?
When you want to say that something happened "in" a specific month, Russian uses the preposition в followed by the prepositional case. The nominative form of the month is май, and its prepositional case ending replaces the short й with an е, making it в мае.
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