Мой или свой? Об эволюции притяжательных местоимений в русском языке после XVIII века

Russian Linguistics. 2021. Т. 45. № 1. С. 75–91.

Пекелис О. Е.

In this paper, I examine the distribution of personal and reflexive possessive

pronouns referring to the 1st and 2nd person possessors in Russian since the 18th

century. Based on the Russian National Corpus data, it is demonstrated that the

frequency of the reflexive possessive has increased significantly in the 21st century

compared with the 19th century. Contrary to expectations, however, personal

possessive pronouns were less frequent than the reflexive as early as in the 19th

century, while their competition with the reflexive possessive evolved differently

depending on the number and person of the possessor. I suggest that the increase in

frequency of the reflexive possessive is a symptom of its being conventionalized as a

default means for expressing the possessor in Russian. This increase was indeed

accompanied by the weakening of the semantic distinction between personal and

reflexive possessive pronouns, as is typical for conventionalization.

Keywords: эмпатия, рефлексив, притяжательные местоимения, история русского языка, славянские языки, корпуса языка

Publication based on the results of: Corpus technologies in the study of language variation and change (2021)