The be‐auxiliary's categorial status in Old Russian1

This article proposes that the present tense forms of the be‐auxiliary byti (AUX) in Old Russian should be identified as weak pronouns, based on their prosodic, morphological, and syntactic properties. The loss of AUX in Old Russian, which distinguishes East Slavic from West and South Slavic languag...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Studia linguistica 2020-12, Vol.74 (3), p.613-644
Main Author: Jung, Hakyung
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:This article proposes that the present tense forms of the be‐auxiliary byti (AUX) in Old Russian should be identified as weak pronouns, based on their prosodic, morphological, and syntactic properties. The loss of AUX in Old Russian, which distinguishes East Slavic from West and South Slavic languages, is ascribed to the competition between AUX and strong subject pronouns as a consequence of the reanalysis of AUX as a weak subject pronoun. This reanalysis was triggered by the early loss of synthetic past tenses in Old Russian. The AUX's position to the right of pronominal clitics indicates that the AUX remains in its initial merge position either as an auxiliary verb or as a subject pronoun. The co‐occurrence of AUXin situ and a null subject in Old Russian implies that rich verbal agreement and null subjects are unrelated with verb raising to I0.
ISSN:0039-3193
1467-9582
DOI:10.1111/stul.12136