Special Issue: Russian Historical Morphosyntax in the Light of Language Contact

This issue of Scando-Slavica is devoted to the topic of morphosyntactic change in Russian in the light of language contact. It is the outcome of two linguistics panels at the 21^st Conference of Scandinavian Slavists that took place in August 2019 at the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu campus.

The papers examine various aspects and possible morphosyntactic consequences of convergence during the development of the Russian language pointing to historical or prehistoric language contacts in the area of Northern East Slavic. While some papers deal with the phenomena that make Russian stand out against the background of even its closest relatives and may thus have been triggered by such contacts, others address broader issues and consider theoretical implications of contact phenomena, the specific contact configurations, and the interplay between internal and external factors in morphosyntactic processes.

Andersen’s article addresses the origin and development of definiteness marking in the adjective phrase in Germanic, Baltic and Slavic, and considers three possible hypotheses of prehistoric bilingual language contact in various configurations, as well as areal convergence. The examination of the definite paradigms in all three language families at the earliest historical stages leads Andersen to the conclusion that they are archaisms rather than innovations. In the final analysis, Andersen prefers the idea of direct borrowing of definiteness marking from Germanic. He explains that contacts between Germanic, Baltic and Slavic went on for a very long time, occurring before the invasion of the Huns in 375 A.D. The Slavic and Baltic subordinators (the term he uses for the PIE pronoun *-yo attested in Indo-Iranian) changed into definite markers because of the contacts with East Germanic groups before then, and their spread continued thereafter. One part of Andersen’s article deals with the terminology and methodological issues of language contact. He elaborates on the idea of functional equivalence in language contact and stresses the importance of accounting for innovations on the level of the speaker in order to produce a realistic explanation of the process.

Penkova investigates the problem of the periphrastic future formation with inchoative auxiliaries during the Middle Russian period. Leaning on typological, functional and source evidence, she argues that contact with Finno-Ugric languages accounts for the burst of productivity of the future with one of the three ‘begin’ auxiliaries that first appears in 15^th-century texts – učnu. Her findings are based on data from the Middle Russian sub-corpus (15^th–17^th centuries) of the Russian National Corpus. Penkova observes that the patterns of distribution of the three verbs differ greatly and believes that učnu is semantically similar to the modern Russian stanu ‘will rise/begin’. The lack of traces in the development of učnu, and the restricted pattern of attestation in Russian (it appears only in infinitive clauses), leads Penkova to hypothesize that the construction is likely to have been borrowed. The fact that the earliest and the relic attestations appear in the area around the Grand Duchy of Moscow, also points to the likelihood of the borrowing from the substrate Finno-Ugric languages.

Seržant’s paper is a typological investigation of macro-areal pressures on the mechanism determining the retention or loss of an inherited feature, as reflected in two categories, “verbal person-number indexes” (subject agreement markers) and partitivity markers. Slavic is situated in the transitional zone between innovating and conservative languages. Seržant claims that the retention of the PIE person-number agreement markers has to do with conservative systems in the adjacent genetically unrelated languages so that an East-West cline (from northwestern Europe to northeastern Asia) can be observed. In order to measure the “decay factor” of person-number indexes, Seržant draws on a database of six language families of Eurasia. He establishes that there is a strong correlation between the intensity of language contact and the decay factor. As regards partitivity marking, Seržant considers it to be an innovation shared by all Slavic languages indicating the change from marking possessivity to marking spatial relations and separation. Here, too, he relies on an extensive database of 46 language families. He finds areal tendencies in his sample of genetically related and unrelated languages of the Eurasian continent, as well, although no particular contact configuration can be established for the partitive innovation.

Bratishenko turns to the history of the so-called nominative and infinitive construction. Using the 16^th-century Domostroj as a starting point for her discussion, she argues that it manifests both old and new aspects of the nominative and infinitive. Bratishenko’s focus is on the internal processes that may have contributed to the emergence and productivity of this construction. She particularly stresses the likely origin of nominative and infinitive in oral law. As for its subsequent development, the nominative must have been subject to reanalysis in reaction to the rise of the genitive-accusative syncretism as a marker of morphological animacy within the masculine personal *o-stems. She suggests that the Common Slavic dative and infinitive clause was especially open to the adoption of the nominative form for the object due to the non-prototypicality of the infinitive clause in relation to finite transitive usage. Moreover, the *a-stem singular paradigm was predisposed to the usage of the nominative in the accusative function. The *a-stem nouns shared their prehistoric morphological development with the neuter gender, and, although they had an accusative singular distinct from the nominative, it did not participate in the morphological opposition along the lines of animacy. Contact with Finnic languages to which the nominative object is native, may have facilitated this innovation.

Leisiö explores the functions of the prepositional phrase consisting of the preposition u ‘at’ and the genitive (u + GEN) with human referent in the history of Russian. In Modern Russian, it encodes predicative possession, an external possessor and a human non-recipient third argument of three groups of verbs: ‘taking away’, ‘buying’ and ‘asking/requesting’. Her analysis is based on data from the Primary Chronicle as well as the Old East Slavic and Middle Russian corpora of the Russian National Corpus. She demonstrates that the roles of u + GEN should be considered within the Ablative-Locative spread (as opposed to shift) whereby u + GEN superseded the locative role and, at the same time, retained the ablative role. The corpus evidence shows that u + GEN was used as a human non-recipient third argument of the three groups of verbs already in Old East Slavic, and the entrenchment of this encoding was prominent in Old Russian. She assumes that u + GEN retained its ablative function for external and internal reasons, such as a drift in the development of the possessive function of the u + GEN on the one hand, and language contacts, on the other. The speakers of Eastern Finnic languages transferred the locative-ablative case syncretism of their mother tongue into Old East Slavic and Old Russian during the process of language shift.

The five articles included in this thematic issue thus represent a broad range of topics and methodological approaches. Overall, we hope that the discussions presented here will contribute to bringing together more explicitly diachronic Slavic research and areal contact research, and ultimately to the advancement of the study of language change and its causes.