On the possessive perfect in North Russian

Abstract

Šafranov (1852:10–11) appears to be the first work where attention was drawn to the fact that the North Russian construction u ‘at’ + noun (in the genitive) + participle ending in -no/-to, as in U menja v dome ubrano (At-me-in-home-tidied-up; ‘I have tidied up at home’) completely corresponds to the German possessive perfect as in Ich habe im Hause alles in schöne Ordnung gebracht.

Our main goal is to show that even though the possessive perfect in North Russian may be identifiable as a “reliable attestation” as late as the 19th century, it is the result of a gradual grammaticalization process which started as early as the 11th-12th century. On the basis of the diachronic facts available, as well as the historical sociolinguistic context, and drawing upon the cross-linguistic generalizations made within the framework of grammaticalization theory, we will propose a stage-by-stage grammaticalization development of the North Russian possessive perfect. We will take issue with one of the most debated questions in grammaticalization theory, the unidirectionality of development. We will describe how with respect to one particular criterion, gender/number agreement, the grammaticalization of the North Russian possessive perfect appears to be at variance, in the incipient stage of the process, with the unidirectionality hypothesis. We will show, however, that despite this initial “reversal” of directionality, once the possessive perfect construction gained ground in the language, and started developing along the possession-to-perfect grammaticalization path, it behaved in accordance with the predictions made by the unidirectionality hypothesis in grammaticalization.