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Экспансия местоимений в истории русского языка: именные клаузы
The Russian language has undergone typologically rare changes in its subject reference marking pattern. Namely, if Old Russian employed verbal inflection for marking subject, modern Russian does it mostly by personal pronouns. During the history verb copulas which performed the referential function in Old Russian were completely lost. The reasons and details of such a transition are of great interest. At the moment, it is established that at the earliest stage pronoun expansion and copular loss have both occurred in nominal clauses, but until now it has not been investigated how exactly these two parallel processes interacted with each other and which of them triggered the initial shift. In this article, based on a new diachronic analysis of the monuments of the 11th–17th centuries (313 relevant clauses), we will try to answer these questions.