On the Nominative with Infinitive: Notes in the Margins of the Domostroj

ABSTRACT

The paper deals with Nom. object construction attested historically in East Slavic and Middle Russian texts, as well as in some modern dialects of the North and North West. Using the 16^th-century Domostroj as the starting point for the discussion, the article focusses on the fact that Nom.+Inf. is associated with the legal genre. This presupposes its oral origin and sheds a new light on the possible evolution of this construction. It is argued that the transitive infinitive construction has a non-prototypical status in relation to the finite clause. The non-prototypicality comes from the modal semantics and the irrealis nature of the infinitive and the oblique Dat. subject. The nouns of the feminine *a-stem declension due to their evolution are especially predisposed to the Nom. form in infinitive construction. The opposition between the Nom. and the Acc. in this declension is weak. At the time when the Gen.-Acc. arose as a marker of morphological animacy, *a-stem nouns were pulled in the animacy opposition as well. The Nom. form became a variant of the Acc. for such nouns, by analogy to the Nom.-Acc. syncretism in other declensions and despite the fact that they had a separate Acc. form.

KEYWORDS:

• Nominative and Infinitive
• the Domostroj
• history of Russian
• language of law
• morphological animacy marking
• internal and external factors in language change

Notes

1 See Larin 1963 for a detailed overview of the early stages of research on Nom.+Inf., Timberlake 1974 for a bibliography, and Dunn 1982 for a comprehensive summary of research. Krys′ko 1994, Mendoza 2006, Zimmerling 2019, and Ronko 2017 represent recent perspectives on the topic.

2 Some give a broader range for the dates of written attestations as 12^th –18^th c., e.g. Timberlake (1974, 5). Zimmerling (2019, 306–307) discusses earlier, 12^th c., attestations, two in birch barks, and several in Voprošanie Kirikovo. While it is possible to accept voda piti ‘water to drink’ in No. 10, even though it lacks the modal meaning ‘water should be had’ typical for Nom.+Inf., No. 155 is missing the corner, so, strictly speaking, the infinitive is reconstructed. As for those in Voprošanie Kirikovo, they cannot really be unequivocally considered as 12^th c. evidence, because the earliest extant copy of this 1156 text is part of the Novgorod Nomokanon dated 1282 at the earliest. (Sreznevskij 1882, 143–144) Other 12^th-century attestations of the Nom. are not with the infinitive (Krys′ko 1994, 192), and some of them could have alternative interpretations. In any case, this is not a crucial point, as the construction, most likely, is of prehistoric origin.

3 For the sake of economy, *ja-stems are included in this notation as well.

4 See Unbegaun (1935, 128–131) for the examples of *i-stem nouns with such modifiers from various 16^th-century sources.

5 Krys′ko (1994, 193 fn56), doubts the extent of such usage.

6 See in particular Larin 1963. Timberlake 1974 discusses the constraints on the Nom. in all three language families.

7 See Thomason and Kaufman (1988, 238–51) discussion of the evidence of the Uralic substratum in Slavic and Baltic.

8 See also Filin (1972, 488–90) and Krys′ko (1994, 192). Zimmerling (2019, 334) reluctantly accepts the possibility of a syntactic borrowing but expresses doubts about this hypothesis noting how many facts remain unexplained.

9 Sahrimaa’s (1999, 71) study of modern Karelian and Russian convergence, by following the dictum that “the best explanations of language change account for the interplay of language-internal and language-external factors,” is able to demonstrate the complexities of “detangling” several types of code-switching in regions of centuries-long language contact and bilingualism, and the diversity of factors affecting the speaker’s choice. See also Thomason and Kaufman (1988) and Leinonen (2002, 158).

10 See Fortuin 2005 on the Dat. with infinitive in Russian.

11 The distinction between semantic (reference to the class of living/active beings) and morphological animacy (Gen-Acc. syncretism within the masculine personal nouns of the *o-stem declension) is an important one for the history of Russian, of course.

12 Prototypicality is used here in terms of the cognitive linguistics framework that postulates that linguistic categories are structured radially, as a network with a prototype at the center, and “membership in a category is determined by perceived resemblances to typical instances” and is a matter of degree. (Langacker 1990, 59)

13 The infinitive usage resembles shall in the English legal language.

14 This neutralization of contrast between the Nom. and the Acc. has prompted ergative explanations for Nom.+Inf. Larin (1963, 93) sees great promise for understanding this usage in stepping away from the Indo-European Nom.-Acc. “canon.” Even though his ergative explanation may not be the ultimate solution, such an attitude is reasonable, especially in view of language contact.

15 The introductory conjunction a ‘and’, a typical feature of the oral legal texts (Birnbaum (1962, 135), Ivanov and Toporov (1978, 224), is also very common in the Domostroj.

16 It covers such diverse subject matter as advice on how to run a noble household and treat one’s kin and servants, how to look after the homestead, livestock, and various possessions and implements, how to economize, how to make and take care of clothes, how to preserve and prepare food, what to serve during lent and during holidays, and how to perform a wedding.

17 Cf. Popova (2017, 254, 256) on the value of this monument for studying the Nom.+Inf.

18 Potebnja’s (1958) name is most often mentioned in connection with this idea which is postulated on the basis of the origin of the infinitive as the Dat. nominal form.

19 See the reasoning for treating the case of the noun as Nom. in Timberlake 1974, Krys′ko (1994, 193), Zimmerling (2019, 301–302).

20 See references and opposing arguments in Filin (1972, 487–90).

21 While Zimmerling 2019 is a corpus-based diachronic investigation of Nom.+Inf., Ronko 2017 applies this theory to the data from contemporary Northern dialects.

22 Research indicating that this usage is not confined to the East Slavic North and North-West is favourably evaluated by Larin (1963, 95) and Krys′ko 1994. See Filin 1969 for arguments against a broad distribution of Nom.+Inf.

23 See also discussion and references in Zimmerling (2019).

24 Schaeken (2001, 329), following Zaliznjak, considers the language of the 1229 treaty as representative of the everyday register (bytovoj stil′).

25 See, for example, Larin (1963, 97–99), Krys′ko (1994, 194), Zimmerling (2019, 304).

26 See especially Georgieva (1949).

27 Krys′ko (1994, 192), with reference to Popov, explains this by the nominal origin of the infinitive (as Dat.) and the meaning of goal that the Dat. case had early on.

28 In Russian, of course, the infinitive is used in commands to subordinates, particularly soldiers and dogs.

29 This touches on the original function of the Nom. as that of subject or object. It looks like the scribe of copy D treats the Nom. as the subject.

30 l refers to the line number in the edition cited.

31 The *o-stem noun sapogŭ ‘boot’ could be either Nom.-Acc. sg. or Gen. pl.; the latter more likely in pragmatic terms maybe, but strange in terms of the Nom./Acc. sg of the preceding nouns in the same object function of the verb bljusti ‘to take good care of’. It is indeed one of the verbs that takes the direct object in the Gen.

32 When by is used with the infinitive, its semantic sense changes from obligation to desirability, although it can also mean inevitable, predetermined actions (Borkovskij 1968, 164–65).

33 Cf. Fortuin’s (2005, 42) treatment of Russian infinitive constructions without the Dat., in that he still considers them Dat. and infinitive and says that “[t]he absence of a dative in such sentences can in some cases be motivated by the generic status of the subject of the infinitive situation […] This conforms to a more general phenomenon in Russian that the non-expression of a subject may be interpreted as referring to a generic subject (‘one’).”

Potebnja (1958, 405), too, speaks of the infinitive “with transparent subject, the Dat. (present or implied)” (My translation – E. B.). See also Zimmerling (2019, 304–305).

34 Cf. Timberlake’s (1974, 98) “systematically impersonal environment” as a precondition for the Nom. object – the construction that lacks a syntactic subject in the Nom.

35 Žuravlev (1991, 141–45) elaborates on the idea of the neutralization of the opposition between cases as it is manifested in Nom+Inf. in Russian and similar usage in the neighbouring Baltic languages.

36 Georgieva (1949, 57, 58) ponders the idea that the infinitive and the Nom. did not initially stand in any syntactic relations with each other. In some way, Nom.+Inf. resembles a compound, especially since the Nom. is usually pre-posed. As Timberlake (1974, 217) reports (with reference to Kiekbaev), there are Altaic languages where the indefinite Nom. object is adjacent to the verb and forms a single stress unit with it, and does not count as a grammatical constituent.

37 Klenin (1983, 417, 418) considers not only the Nom.+Inf. but other innovations, such as the Acc. object of passive participles, “oddities” caused by the major changes in the verbal rection and the instability in the expression of voice. Moreover, she submits that the Gen.-Acc. itself was “a by-product of a more general shift in rection in Slavic.”

38 Tomson (1913/2006, 112–13), writing about prehistory, argues that “inactive” nouns (the term he prefers to ‘animate’ for PIE) of the *o-stem declension acquired a specific patient marker -m by analogy to the many nouns of the same declension denoting living beings. A minority of the *a-stem nouns, such as žena ‘woman’ that denoted human beings also adopted the -m for patient marking at some point; the same form later extended to all *a-stems.

39 This is an original *ĭ-stem noun. Feminine *ǐ-stem nouns had Nom.-Acc. syncretism, just like the neuter *o-stems. Masculine, and a few originally feminine *ǐ-stems denoting animals joined *o-stems and underwent Gen.-Acc. syncretism.

40 Luraghi (2011, 437) mentions that Nom./Acc. pl. neuter has sg. agreement in languages such as Ancient Greek. She also notes that the extension of this suffix to feminine is more difficult to motivate semantically.

41 The reverse reanalysis is also documented: the first adjective in svjataja svjatych ‘Holy of Holies’ is taken to be feminine sg. in contemporary Russian.

42 When used with the verb doiti ‘to milk’ korova could be interpreted metonymically as a substance noun, a source of milk that is continually replenished.

43 Cf. Luraghi (2011, 457) who writes that “in the early PIE two-gender system […] gender was in a way epiphenomenon of case marking patterns, and it arose as a consequence of inanimate nouns not having endings for the nominative and the accusative case.”

44 Popova (2017, 261) gives several examples of semantically animate nouns in Nom.+Acc. from the Muscovite sources of the 16^th–18^th centuries as evidence against statements that animacy inhibits the Nom.