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On the evolution of Russian subject reference

Internal factors

Abstract

Personal pronouns in Russian have replaced verbal inflection forms as the main reduced referential devices marking subject. Some possible internal scenarios of this process are examined, namely the present perfect reconstruction in Old Russian and the semantic similarity between Old Russian present nominal clauses and present verbal ones. Further testing of both hypotheses is based on the detailed chronological survey on 50 Old Russian texts (about 2000 relevant verbal clauses) from the 11th till the 17th century with the help of statistical methods (Student’s t-test and Lilliefors test). The diachronic study of Old Russian documents disproves the hypothesis of initial perfect tense destruction but admits the possibility of semantic factors as a trigger to the subject reference alternation.

Abstract

Personal pronouns in Russian have replaced verbal inflection forms as the main reduced referential devices marking subject. Some possible internal scenarios of this process are examined, namely the present perfect reconstruction in Old Russian and the semantic similarity between Old Russian present nominal clauses and present verbal ones. Further testing of both hypotheses is based on the detailed chronological survey on 50 Old Russian texts (about 2000 relevant verbal clauses) from the 11th till the 17th century with the help of statistical methods (Student’s t-test and Lilliefors test). The diachronic study of Old Russian documents disproves the hypothesis of initial perfect tense destruction but admits the possibility of semantic factors as a trigger to the subject reference alternation.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. List of contributors vii
  4. Preface ix
  5. Introduction xi
  6. I. Verbal Categories and Processes in Categorizations
  7. The tense-aspect system of Khorchin Mongolian 3
  8. Locational and directional relations and tense and aspect marking in Chalkan, a South Siberian Turkic language 67
  9. Conspiring motivations for causative and passive isomorphism: 91
  10. II. Syntactic Functions and Case-Marking
  11. Spatial semantics, case and relator nouns in Evenki 111
  12. A survey of alignment features in the Greater Hindukush with special references to Indo-Aryan 133
  13. Between predicative and attributive possession in Bashkir 175
  14. III. Clause Combining and Discourse
  15. Areal features of copula sentences in Karaim as spoken in Lithuania 205
  16. Non-past copular markers in Turkish 221
  17. On the distribution of the contrastive-concessive discourse connectives ama ‘but/yet’ and fakat ‘but’ in written Turkish 251
  18. Anaphora in Ossetic correlatives and the typology of clause combining 275
  19. Kinds of evidentiality in German complement clauses 311
  20. Evidentiality in Dzungar Tuvan 339
  21. IV. Historical Issues
  22. On the evolution of Russian subject reference 381
  23. The development of negation in the Transeurasian languages 401
  24. List of Index 421
On Diversity and Complexity of Languages Spoken in Europe and North and Central Asia
This chapter is in the book On Diversity and Complexity of Languages Spoken in Europe and North and Central Asia
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.164.13sid

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. List of contributors vii
  4. Preface ix
  5. Introduction xi
  6. I. Verbal Categories and Processes in Categorizations
  7. The tense-aspect system of Khorchin Mongolian 3
  8. Locational and directional relations and tense and aspect marking in Chalkan, a South Siberian Turkic language 67
  9. Conspiring motivations for causative and passive isomorphism: 91
  10. II. Syntactic Functions and Case-Marking
  11. Spatial semantics, case and relator nouns in Evenki 111
  12. A survey of alignment features in the Greater Hindukush with special references to Indo-Aryan 133
  13. Between predicative and attributive possession in Bashkir 175
  14. III. Clause Combining and Discourse
  15. Areal features of copula sentences in Karaim as spoken in Lithuania 205
  16. Non-past copular markers in Turkish 221
  17. On the distribution of the contrastive-concessive discourse connectives ama ‘but/yet’ and fakat ‘but’ in written Turkish 251
  18. Anaphora in Ossetic correlatives and the typology of clause combining 275
  19. Kinds of evidentiality in German complement clauses 311
  20. Evidentiality in Dzungar Tuvan 339
  21. IV. Historical Issues
  22. On the evolution of Russian subject reference 381
  23. The development of negation in the Transeurasian languages 401
  24. List of Index 421
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