Scholars of the Russian language may find the synthesis of Russian verbs a little easier thanks to a new book by Dr. Irina Ivliyeva, an instructor of Russian at the University of Missouri-Rolla. Her book, "Problems in the Synthesis of Russian Verbs," was published in Moscow in 2003 by RUDN Press.

The book is intended to help Russian scholars with the process of word formation synthesis. Through this process new meanings are assigned to existing words. Ivliyeva uses the verb "redo" as an example. "It means just to do one more time, but it can also mean to do in some other way, either worse or improved."

Ivliyeva says another goal in writing the book was to help students understand Russian words by analyzing the meanings of their individual parts, like prefixes and suffixes. She also hopes to help them select appropriate words for colloquial usage when speaking Russian.

In addition, Ivliyeva expects her work to help computers translate Russian words by deriving the meaning of the entire word from the meanings of its individual parts. This could be valuable in computerized translations and interpretation of Russian texts, Ivliyeva says.

A native of Moscow, Ivliyeva teaches Russian at UMR. She recently published two articles in the Russian journal Humans and Universe, "An Idea About Creating the Modification Dictionary of Russian Verbs" and "Comparative Analysis of Russian Verbs of Pronunciation, Singing and Speech Production."