Chapter 1. Clause and text organization in early East Slavic with reference to motion and position expressions
This article presents a pragmatic analysis of constituent order in clauses containing intransitive verbs of motion and position drawn from a range of early East Slavic sources. The influence of context on constituent order accounts only partially for the diversity of syntactic patterns attested, and the article suggests that functional descriptions of clause patterns (e.g., ‘presentational’) used in work on modern languages are of doubtful value in the study of pre-modern material. The analysis reveals some notable ways in which conventions of text organization observed by early writers differ from those of modern texts, and the article concludes that these conventions of text organization are themselves a significant obstacle to elucidating general principles of clause organization in early East Slavic.