Article published in:
Causation, Permission, and Transfer: Argument realisation in GET, TAKE, PUT, GIVE and LET verbs
Edited by Brian Nolan, Gudrun Rawoens and Elke Diedrichsen
[Studies in Language Companion Series 167] 2015
► pp. 107–127

Grammaticalization of ‘give’ in Slavic between drift and contact

Causative, modal, imperative, existential, optative and volative constructions

| Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences
This paper gives an overview of grammaticalized constructions involving ‘give’ in the Slavic languages. The most widespread functions concern causatives ranging from permissive (‘letting’) to factitive (‘making’ or ‘having’) and a modal maker constructed with a reflexive (‘let itself’ > ‘it is possible’). These constructions are most widely developed in the West Slavic (Polish, Czech, Slovak and Sorbian) and Western South Slavic (Slovenian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian) languages. In Russian and the other East Slavic Languages Ukrainian and Belarusian, the use of hortative and imperative markers is more conspicuous. Further developments include the use of an existential construction closely modeling German ‘es gibt’ and an isolated optative function in Sorbian, as well as a volative construction in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. While some of these developments reflect well known grammaticalization paths, others more clearly reflect idiosyncratic areal patterns converging with German models. An attempt is made to evaluate possible factors and pathways in the development of these constructions, paying special attention to the factor of language contact.
Published online: 14 January 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.167.03wal
Corpora

Corpora

BNK: Bulgarian National Corpus
Institute for Bulgarian language, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. ibl​.bas​.bg​/BGNC​_bg​.htm
CNK: Czech National Corpus – SYN2009PUB. Institute of the Czech National Corpus FF UK, Praha 2010 www​.korpus​.cz
GigaFida: Gigafida Reference Corpus of Slovenian
Ministry of Education, Science and Sport, Republic of Slovenia. www​.gigafida​.net
NKJP : Przepiórkowski, Adam, Banko, Miroslaw, Górski, Rafał & Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara (eds) 2012 Narodowy Korpus Jezyka Polskiego. PWN, Warsaw. nkjp​.plGoogle Scholar
ParaSol : von Waldenfels, Ruprecht & Meyer, Roland 2006- ParaSol, a Parallel Corpus of Slavic and Other Languages. Bern. parasol​.unibe​.ch
RNC: Russian National Corpus
www​.ruscorpora​.ru

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