Russian indefinite markersto and nibud’: a microdiachronic approach

Russian linguistics. 2023. Vol. 47. No. 2. P. 253–277.

Olga E. Pekelis

This paper deals with the evolution of the Russian indefinite series to and nibud’ after the 18th century. The Russian National Corpus data show that in the 18th-19th centuries, to was almost strictly specific, while nibud’ was slightly less non-specific compared to modern Russian. In the 20th century, to expanded to non-specific contexts but, crucially, did so inconsistently: it overtook nibud’ in frequency in conditionals and questions, but not in imperatives. These facts raise the following questions: (i) What triggered the expansion of to? (ii) Why was this expansion inconsistent? The answers that I suggest are as follows: (i) To expanded because its relationship with nibud’ was close to that of complementary distribution, which is a typologically rare, hence, unstable situation. (ii) To expanded to those non-specific contexts that helped to accommodate the originally specific semantics of to to the non-specific meaning of the context.

Keywords: корпусные исследования, indefinite pronouns, неопределенные местоимения, семантические карты, corpus studies in linguistics, Russian language of the XVIII century, русский язык XIX века, semantic maps

Publication based on the results of: Standard and Non-standard Russian Speech: Consistency and Variability (2023)