Is there any possessive perfect in North Russian?

Abstract

Bridget Drinka has recently revived an areal interpretation of the European periphrastic perfect diffusing from the Romance languages via German to Slavic, including North Russian. Based on the material from Slavic and Baltic languages, a totally different developmental vista of the be-possessive construction is offered in this paper. A special emphasis is made on a scale of the agenthood as posited both for Proto-Indo- European (PIE) and certain Slavic dialects. Along with an independent appearance of the accusative (or of a functionally equivalent genitive) in the be-possessive construction both in East Slavic and Lithuanian, this scale testifies to the indigenous ergative alignment, which is manifested dialectally and discourse-pragmatically in these languages. As a result, a distinction is drawn between different categories, i. e., the Western European possessive perfect, which is paralleled in the New Slavic perfect, and the northern Russian possessive resultative.