Middle Russian Future Periphrastic Constructions in the Light of Language Contacts

ABSTRACT

This paper examines periphrastic constructions with future time reference in Middle Russian, focusing on constructions with an inchoative verb and an infinitive clause: počnu ‘begin’ + inf, načnu ‘begin’ + inf, imu ‘take > begin’ + inf, učnu ‘begin’+ inf, and stanu ‘rise > begin, become’+ inf. The author compares these periphrastic constructions and establishes that the verb učati ‘begin’ differed from the rest of the inchoatives (počati, načati, jati, stati) in that its distribution was functionally restricted and its derivational potential limited (i.e. no verbal nouns, participles, or imperfective verbs derived from this stem). On the

1 I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers from Scando-Slavica, the editors of the volume for their valuable comments, and Dr. Katie Sykes for her professional English language editing.

basis of these features, the author argues that učnu + inf emerged due to contact influence: specifically, the borrowing of a pattern from a Finno-Ugric language spoken in the eastern or northern part of the Grand Duchy of Moscow at the time. It is likely impossible to identify the construction which served as a source for učnu + inf. The author’s hypothesis is further supported by data from contemporary dialects and early attestations in official documents from eastern and northern areas.

KEYWORDS:

• inchoative verbs
• language contact
• Middle Russian
• periphrastic future
• Russian National Corpus
• Finno-Ugric languages

Notes

1 I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers from Scando-Slavica, the editors of the volume for their valuable comments, and Dr. Katie Sykes for her professional English language editing.

2 Here and below, the first-person singular form is used as an abbreviation of the respective auxiliary used in a periphrastic construction.

3 For the future anterior, or the so-called “second compound future” in Old and Middle Russian, rarely used for future time reference, see Penkova (2019a; 2014; 2019b).

4 Future time reference

5 The notion of contact incorporates not only states, but also dynamic actions.

6 Old East Slavic period covers the period from the 11th until the 14th centuries, Middle Russian — from the 15th until the 17th centuries.

7 There is also another inchoative verb usually mentioned in Old Church Slavonic grammar – v’’čati, but it only marginally occurs in Old Church Slavonic as well as in Old East Slavic sources (cf. SRJa 11–17, 170) and, thus, cannot be considered an auxiliary for periphrastic constructions.

8 Constructions with FTR are classified according to their general meaning and the original meaning of the auxiliary in question.

9 Here and onwards, citations of Old East Slavic and Middle Russian sources are extracted from the Russian National Corpus (NKRJA).

10 Constructions with FTR are classified according to their general meaning and the original meaning of the auxiliary in question.

11 The attribution of a particular auxiliary to a certain family gram may change over time. For this reason, we refer to such changes by introducing a particular evolutionary path, i.e. RISE > BEGIN, BECOME; TAKE, SEIZE > BEGIN, etc.

12 Inchoatives should be considered according to their semantics, distinguishing between uses with a focus on the initial phase of a situation and uses which focus on the emergence of a new situation. However, most contexts are ambiguous, so at this stage, it is impossible to estimate the frequency of each of these uses. Moreover, the Middle Russian corpus is not lexically annotated, so frequency can be estimated only in instances per million words.

13 Ipm – Instances per million words.

14 The whole Middle Russian corpus contains more than eight million tokens: 1010714 word forms in the 15th-century text corpus, 3452211 word forms in the 16th-century text corpus, and 3613710 word forms in the 17th-century text corpus at the time of accessing.

15 Joan Bybee and Sandra Thompson (1997, 378) propose distinguishing two types of frequency: token frequency and type frequency. The latter refers to the number of different lexical items a construction is applicable to. Studying this phenomenon did not give significant results. However, comparing frequencies of periphrastic constructions in different types of clauses, i.e. measuring clause-type frequency, turned out to be much more revealing (Penkova 2019a).

16 Imperfective counterpart is not attested in Middle Russian but is known in some modern Russian dialects.

17 The problem of the further disappearance of učati in Standard Russian is not connected with language contacts and calls for separate research.