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Multiple prefixation in Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian
This paper is devoted to Old Church Slavonic (OCS) and Old Russian (OR) compound verbs with stacked prefixes. Although prefixes are a well investigated topic as regards modern Slavic languages, multiple prefixation in ancient Slavic languages still needs to be extensively explored. This work is a further step in this direction: via a careful manual scrutiny of the relevant data automatically extracted from the TOROT Treebank, we compare OCS and OR prefix orderings and we analyze multiply prefixed verbs both semantically and syntactically. As regards semantics, prefix stacking only rarely results in a fully compositional compound. More often, the resulting compounds are partially compositional or lexicalized. However, OCS and OR prefixes still retain (at least partially) their lexical value and are far from being pure perfectivity markers. Consequently, this also affects their syntactic behavior: the lexical modifications brought about by prefixes sometimes have the side effect of modifying the case taken by verbal compounds.