The large majority of the Slavic languages have in historical times lost the synthetic past tenses of the aorist and the imperfect. These tenses were replaced by a new past tense based on the erstwhile perfect. This transformation created space for new ways of forming a past tense, and one of these was a novel past tense based on the past active participle, also called the gerundial past tense, a past tense found in Northwest Russia, above all in the Pskov area, cf. Pskov dialectal i jon pom'orši toper’ uže, versus Standard Russia i on teper’ uže umer, ‘and he died now already’. The point of this article is to demonstrate how the emergence of the l-participle as the general past tense opened up for a reanalysis of the past active participle as a finite past tense verb-form. The actualization process following this reanalysis is illustrated by examples from the Pskov Chronicle.
