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This issue of Scando-Slavica is devoted to the topic of morphosyntactic change in Russian in the light of language contact. It is the outcome of two linguistics panels at the 21st Conference of Sca...

The history of the adjective in Russian manifests the convergence of its declensional paradigm with the declension of non-personal pronouns. The present paper focuses on the sg. masc. ending -ogo, the syncretic Gen.-Acc. that replaces the corresponding ending -ago in Old East Slavic, the ending -ago being the result of prehistoric compounding of the short adjective and the anaphoric pronoun jego. While the development of the adjectival paradigm, separate from that originally shared with nouns, took the compounding route at some stage, it may have not been quite linear, at least in the Acc. case. It is hypothesized that the ending -ogo was not a new substitute for the old Gen. -ago, but rather a variant Acc. form used since antiquity to refer to persons. It may have already emerged in short adjectives, by direct analogy to kogo (Gen.-Acc. of the interrogative-indefinite kŭto ‘who’), independently of the compounding, in the same manner in which the Gen.-Acc. of non-personal pronouns arose. It is proposed that the compound form marked definiteness, and was associated with long active participles, with transitivity and subject-object distinction especially, while -ogo marked personhood in pronouns and in certain pronoun-like adjectives while they were still part of the nominal paradigm.

The paper examines the attestations of the non-etymological ending -ovi (vs. the etymological -u) in the subject noun of the dative absolute represented by proper personal masculine *o-stem nouns of foreign origin. The idea that -ovi tends to mark a possessor is tested on the data collected for this study from the Laurentian Chronicle. The dative absolute is particularly conducive to the investigation of the subject, because it may contain other nouns in the dative, in various syntactic functions and semantic roles. A seemingly logical initial supposition that, in light of the availability of two variant endings and the association of -ovi with a possessor, the subject of the absolute construction may be predisposed towards the ending -u is not corroborated by the data. The explanation for the prevalence of -ovi in the subject of the dative absolute is proposed in terms of the semantic and morphosyntactic contiguity between the agent, the receiver, and the possessor. The nouns in which -ovi is productive occupy the top of the agent / possessor hierarchy. It is concluded that morphosyntactic variation does reflect the semantic roles of the constituents of the dative absolute but in a less direct way than was initially postulated.

This article addresses the change in the grammatical case used with the adverbial preposition protivu. The usage of protivu was more frequent and its meaning more polysemantic in Old East Slavic than it is in Russian today. The transition of protivu from an adverb to a preposition resulted in the shift in its meaning from more concrete to more abstract: from the spatial meaning ‘towards’ to the meaning of opposition ‘against’. The change in cases used with protivu from the original dative to the genitive also occurred in the process of grammaticalization. The explanation for this development is offered in terms of Talmy’s theory of conceptual structuring. From a schematic system representing motion and relating one entity to another in space as Figure and Ground, constructions with protivu shifted to a system of force dynamics relating two force-exerting entities as Agonist and Antagonist. The confluence of processes taking place in the overall declensional system of Old East Slavic, such as the loss of the dative of destination, as well as the rise of the genitive-accusative and of the genitive of possession created favourable conditions for the change. The dative is shown to fit the directional usage of protivu while the genitive suits its new oppositional sense.

The article addresses a long-standing problem of the history of Russian: the origin of v in place of the etymological g in the Gen. sg. masc./neut. ending of adjectives and non-personal pronouns. This change is treated as conflation of inflectional and derivational morphology through analogy. The analogical substitution first occurred within multi-item personal names where non-Christian (byname) patronymics were used alongside Christian (baptismal) ones. Besides their etymological and morphological differences (quantitative vs. possessive adjectives respectively), the two types of patronymics differed syntactically. Christian patronymics were coordinated with the first name, while non-Christian patronymics were subordinated to the Christian ones as apposition in the Gen. case. If, in addition to the name bearer’s own patronymic/s, his father’s patronymic was used to identify him more precisely, it too would be in the Gen. Written records reveal that the cases of the patronymics were frequently confused, and both types eventually became coordinated with the first name. This triggered an abductive innovation, whereby the derivational morpheme—the possessive adjective-forming suffix -ov- —of one type of patronymics contaminated the Gen. ending -ogo, as well as the Nom. -oj in another type. The formant -ov- became the morphological marker of a Russian surname, while the new Gen. ending spread to regular adjectives.

L'A. examine certaines questions restees sans reponse concernant un manuscrit appartenant a la linguistique historique slave. Il s'agit d'un traite de commerce entre la ville de Smolensk et le port de Riga, ecrit au 13 e siecle. Six copies en deux redactions de ce traite ont ete conservees. En se referant a la copie A, l'A. s'interroge sur la langue d'origine de ce traite et sur les influences linguistiques qui s'en degagent