Do the parallels meet?: On the origin of the accusative with infinitive construction in Slavic
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The paper is concerned with the origin and the development of the Accusative with Infinitive (AcI) construction in Slavic. Looking into the areal-typological, diachronic, and socio-typological parameters of the AcI construction, the author introduces new Slavic dialectal and comparative material and reconstructs the developmental cline of this construction along two parallel pathways of grammaticalization of the second accusative complement in Proto-Indo-European. The grammaticalization of infinitival complementation, typical primarily of those Slavic varieties which acquired secondary analytical features, is distinguished from the grammaticalization of participial complementation which is commonly attested in the history of low-contact Slavic languages and dialects like Southwest Ukrainian and some Polish dialects. Special emphasis is placed on the interaction between infinitival and participial grammaticalization in the history of Slavic standard and non-standard varieties, which allows the author to substantiate an initial switching between the two pathways as attested in Old Church Slavonic and early standard varieties of (West) Slavic.
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This paper elaborates on the developmental scenario of relative clauses in East Slavonic. Premised on a system of areal, diachronic, and sociotypological criteria, the author offers a cross-dialectal typology of relative clause types and their overt linkage markers both inflected U jakyj, B jaki, R kakoj; U kotryj, B katory, R kotoryj ‘which’ and uninflected U ščo, B što, R čto ‘what’; U de, B dze, R gde ‘where’. I argue that, instead of a unilateral developmental trend from the free juxtaposition of clauses to hypotaxis to subordination, one should distinguish between two developmental clines (micro-pathways), one leading from parataxis to paratactic subordination and the second conducive to hypotactic subordination in East Slavonic. In the view of parallel relativization strategies in other Indo-European languages, in particular German dialects, I maintain that the formation of paratactic and hypotactic subordination is dependent on a historically prevalent type of discourse within a language community. Such a type is preconditioned by a particular number of societal factors, including the amount of language contact (based on adult second-language learning). The latter is likely to bring about reduction in syntagmatic redundancy leading to a ‘simpler’ syntactic organization, in particular the development of paratactic subordination.
This paper aims to ascertain the place of the Ukrainian linguist
Oleksandr Popov (1855–80) in the history of Indo-European and
typological studies. Remaining largely unknown in the west, Popov left
a trailblazing contribution to the reconstruction of IE noun inflection.
Critical of Curtius’ approach nourished by the idea of linguistic
absolutism, Popov offered a systematic analysis of the accusative,
nominative, and vocative cases taken in their interdependency. In
view of the interchangeability of the independent accusative and
the independent nominative, Popov argued that the accusative
case might have emerged before the vocative and even prior to the
nominative, with a possibility of the nominative arising before the
accusative. The Ukrainian linguist based his reconstruction on the
distinction between the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ entities encoded by
the nominative in *-s and the accusative in *-m respectively, thus
anticipating discussion of the active typology of Proto-IE in the
20th century. By providing a detailed survey of Popov’s theory, the
author highlights its pioneering character in the light of modern
comparative-historical and typological views.
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