The Twofold Nature of Old East Slavic Iže

Russian linguistics. 2025. Vol. 49. Article 4.

Anna A. Fitiskina

This paper aims to demonstrate that the Old East Slavic pronoun iže, traditionally considered a loanword from Old Church Slavonic and a marker of literacy, was in fact also widely used in secular texts of the earliest period and that its usage there differed considerably from that found in Old East Slavic church-oriented literature. The analysis of a 210,000-word corpus reveals that in secular texts, iže tends to attach the relativising particle to and be used in correlative and headless clauses, whereas in the bookish register, it is predominantly used in postposed and postnominal clauses and syntactic calques from Greek, well-known from Old Church Slavonic. It is also hypothesised that relativisers homonymous to interrogative pronouns began to replace iže shortly before the emergence of writing in Rus. The only Old East Slavic text that is assumed to preserve this state of the relativising system is the short version of the Russkaja Pravda, the written record of which dates back to the middle of the eleventh century.

Keywords: относительные придаточные, древнерусский язык, Old East Slavic, relative clauses, относительные местоимения, Old Russian

Publication based on the results of: Language, literature and culture in historical and social perspective (2025)