Связка ложь, да в ней намек: формы 3 л. глагола «БЫТЬ» в древнерусском языке [A Tale of Two Auxiliaries:Third Person Forms of BYTI in Old Russian ]
Anton Zimmerling
May 2024 

The current estimates for the period when the zero copula ‘BE’ was grammaticalized in the history of Russian, date this process to the 15th–18th centuries. This is a mistake prompted by misleading text samples. The zero copula existed already in Early Old Russian, the key is provided by the perfect construction, where the absence of an overt BE-auxiliary signaled the agreement value ‘3rd person’. I compare five Old Russian author texts from the 12th century, representing three dialects, and prove that weak-stress and stressed 3rd person auxiliaries had a different distribution. I argue that one must distinguish two homonymic constructions with an lparticiple and present tense forms of the BE-auxiliary. The standard Russian perfect, labeled ‘Perfect I’ in this paper, used weak-stress auxiliaries that had person-and-number agreement and licensed an alternation of zero and overt weak-stress 3rd person BE-forms; this alternation lacked semantic motivation, but optional overt 3rd person Perfect I auxiliaries disappeared in the mid-12th century. The homonymic Perfect II construction used stressed 3rd person BE-auxiliaries and had only number, but not person agreement. Overt stressed 3rd person BE-auxiliaries expressed existential-locative or verification semantics.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008116 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Русский язык в научном освещении, т. 44 (2022) № 2, 9 – 84. Doi.org/10.31912/rjano-2022.2.1
keywords:	clitics, clitic clusters, perfect, pluperfect, agreement, verum focus, existentials, dialectal variation, old east slavic, diachrony, syntax, phonology, semantics, morphology
Downloaded:	545 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]