A corpus approach to the history of Russian po
delimitatives
This paper illustrates how enriched diachronic treebank data can shed new light
on an old and vexed topic, even when that topic is primarily morphological and
semantic in nature rather than syntactic. The topic is the rise of the Russian
po delimitatives, a change seen as crucial in most accounts
of the history of Russian aspect, since it represents a major step in
generalising the derivational aspect system. Earlier accounts concur that the
po delimitatives spread fairly recently, too recently for
the development to be connected to the loss of the aorist tense, which also had
delimitative readings with atelic verbs. Using treebank data from the Tromsø Old
Russian and Old Church Slavonic Treebank, enriched with tags for derivational
morphology and semantics, I show that the po delimitatives were
not marginal even in the earliest Slavic sources, either in terms of frequency
or semantics, and that they first complemented and then competed with the
delimitative aorists. It can thus be claimed that the exotic po
delimitatives grew organically out of the old Indo-European inflectional aspect
system.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Previous approaches
- 3.Data and method
- 4.The semantic development of the po prefix
- 5.Aorists vs. po: Verb classes across time
- 5.1OCS
- 5.2Old East Slavic
- 5.3Middle Russian
- 6.Delimitative contexts in Old East Slavic
- 7.Conclusions
-
Notes
-
References
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Appendix