Causal через in Russian

SLAVIA časopis pro slovanskou filologii . 2023. Vol. 92. No. 4. P. 492–503.

Natalia N. Logvinova

The article investigates the causal use of preposition через in Russian in the course of the 18th–20th centuries. Based on the data of Russian National Corpus, I show that causal usage of через was more widespread in the 18th century and has gradually disappeared to date, being occasionally met in the texts of the 20th century. Analysis of the NPs most often cooccurring with causal через has shown that через was mostly used with anaphorical and personal pronouns, unlike other prepositions with causal function (из-за and от). It is shown that in most cases these pronouns refer – either anaphorically or metaphorically – to the situations introduced in the pretext. Accordingly, the conclusion is made that через was specified for propositional causes. Based on this result, I argue that the specification for propositional clauses is conditioned by the cognitive representation of the spatial meaning of через – namely, the propensity of через to cooccur with at least three-dimensional causes.

Keywords: русский язык, диахрония, diachrony, предлоги, prepositions, причина, cause, Russian Language