According to grammars of Russian Church Slavonic there are three primary past tenses: the imperfect, the aorist, and the perfect. The imperfect is typically described as the tense that provides backgrounding, the aorist as the tense that sequences events or recounts vivid events, and the perfect as the tense used for retrospective viewpoints of the speaker which result in objectivizing the signified process (Alipi 2001: 335). In this paper services from the 19th century Russian Church Slavonic Menaion are examined to determine degrees of correspondence to standard descriptive grammars. This paper shows that designations of tense function have little to do with Church Slavonic as it has developed in the Russian tradition, and instead suggests that tense descriptions have been based largely on Old Church Slavonic descriptive grammars.

 

 

 

This paper consists of an analysis of correlations between the accentuation types of Common Slavic (CSl) deverbatives and the original CSl and IE verbs. The CSl deverbatives analyzed in this work are all masculine nouns, which are grouped into one of the four accentual Slavic paradigms, AP-A, AP-B, AP-C, and AP-D (Dybo et al. 1990, 1993, Shrager 2007). Within the analysis, the original verbs are grouped according to the auslaut of the CSl verbal stem in the present tense, i.e. liquids, nasals, j-stems, vowels, etc. (as in Dybo 2000). The comparison of the verbs and the deverbatives shows that verbal stems that in CSl have dominant roots, form deverbatives that have either AP-A, -B or -D; verbal stems with recessive roots form deverbatives that have AP-C. Thus, these findings demonstrate a direct type of correlation for most of the groups. Moreover, the results of this analysis serve an additional proof of the dominant accentuation of the AP-D.

 

 

 

Evidence from early Slavic texts supports the existence of three possessive constructions in late Proto-Slavic: the verb iměti, a dative possessor and an u + genitive construction. Old Church Slavic (OCS) used mainly iměti for predicative possession, e.g. (1) from Codex Marianus.

 

 

 

This paper will question the use of archaeological data in the recent reconstruction of Proto-Slavic dialects by the Slavic historical linguist S. L. Nikolaev (Dybo et. al. 1990) in view of theories of reconstruction based in contrast primarily on linguistic data. Nikolaev uses an approach to the reconstruction of Proto-Slavic dialects that depends on assuming a correlation of linguistic, ethnic and archaeological data. The author tries to give evidence for the reconstruction of his Proto-Slavic dialects by connecting linguistic accentological data to ethnic Slavic “tribal” and archaeological data. Some Slavic linguists doubt that any such connection can be made. As archaic dialects these pre-migration, Proto-Slavic dialects, i.e. from before 500 A.D., could only be directly connected to the Slavic tribes by supporting evidence, no matter what their accentological development.

 

 

 

Recent typological work on ditransitives emphasizes that valence alternations are verb-sensitive. The locative alternation with Russian contact verbs (gruzit' barzhu drovami / drova na barzhu; nasypat' meshok krupoj / krupy v meshok) is not only verb-sensitive but also prefix-sensitive. This paper proposes an account of their interactions. I surveyed six root verbs and the four valence-relevant prefixes na-, za-, po-, ob- in the Russian National Corpus, counting frequencies of theme object (TO, e.g. gruzit' drova na barzhu) and goal object (GO, gruzit' barzhu drovami). Proneness of verbs to GO is: polnit' (100%) > mazat' > gruzit', sypat' > bit', lit'; prefixes: ob- > po- > za- > na- > no prefix; subsense: figurative > literal.

 

 

 

The underlying motivation for choosing genitive or accusative case when negated verbs are used has long been a topic of study. However, this paper examines whether word order plays a role in the genitive/accusative battle. Data from the Russian National Corpus was gathered in order to ascertain whether there are differences in the genitive-to-accusative ratio when direct objects occur before the predicate and when they are found after the predicate in the time periods from 1976-1989 and from 1990-2005. These time periods were selected because as Comrie, Stone, and Polinsky have indicated, the genitive of negation is currently being replaced by the accusative. This paper uses the hierarchies proposed by Timberlake to classify the underlying reasons for a selection of genitive or accusative and then looks at whether the results differ depending on word order and whether the case ratio changes between these two periods.

 

It is traditionally assumed that aspect has been stable since the dawn of Slavic. Schenker (1993) and Lunt (1974) describe the aspectual systems of Proto-Slavic and Old Church Slavic in virtually the same terms one would use to describe modern Russian. However some empirical work (Mayo 1985, Bermel 1997, Nørgård-Sørensen 1997, Dickey 2007) indicates that aspect as we know it in Russian today was sorted out much later, in the 16th-17th centuries. This presentation will argue that the motion verbs provide evidence in support of the latter view.

 

 

 

 

The paper reconsiders internal and external features of the Russian numeral construction (NUM+(Adj)N), one of the most confused and unstable zones of the Russian grammar. Based on the data collected on the Russian Internet, the research tries to discover the direction in which the system is moving. In his comprehensive book on the surface syntax of the Russian cardinal numerals, Igor Mel’čuk called the Russian construction NUM+N “a kind of platypus, an oviparous mammal” (Mel’čuk 1985: 80). This happy metaphor reflects both the fossil diachronic nature of the Russian numerals and, respectively, their synchronic inconsistency.

 

 

 

Reduction of non-high vowels after palatalized consonants and /j/ in unstressed positions in Russian produces [I] (ikan’e): /v’és’olo/ ‘cheerfully’ [v’és’Ilə], /v’es’ol’éj/ ‘more cheerfully’ [v’Is’Il’éj]. But sometimes the reduced vowel is schwa [ə], not the expected [I]. These ‘exceptions’ to ikan’e are found primarily in grammatical endings (Avanesov 1972) and schwa has been attributed to analogy, either to the stressed suffix vowel (Korš 1902) or to the reduced vowel after non-palatalized stems (Isačenko 1947). But stressed suffixes constitute a minority in Russian nouns/adjectives (Zaliznjak 1967:172-3); sometimes no stressed suffix is available, e.g., lísje [l’is’jə] ‘fox’s’. Analogy tends to operate on less frequent items, but schwa is found both in frequent and non-frequent suffixes.