К хронологии утраты действительным причастием прошедшего времени предикативности в истории русского языка

Russian Linguistics. 2023. Т. 47. № 3. С. 323–342.

Maria Ermolova

The paper discusses the use of the short past active participles (PAP) in the Russian language of the 17th c. The data was collected from private letters from the 17th c. and the first Russian newspaper, Vesty-Kuranty. The function of PAP in the XVIIth c. is compared with their use in both the earlier and later centuries. This allows us to revise the traditional conception of the use of participial forms in the analyzed period and of the evolution of their grammatical meaning during the whole historical epoch. The predicative functions of PAP did not decline, as it is traditionally believed, but rose in the course of time. The language material of the 17th c. testifies that PAP in the live language of the end of the Old Russian period could function as a syntactic and grammatical synonym of the l-form, even forming the conditional with the particle by. The fact of the increment of the finite characteristics of PAP allows us to point at the parallelism in the development of all participial forms – both active and passive participles that also could be used finitely. Modern mistakes in the use of the gerunds when subjects of the participle and of the predicate are different are results of the previous stage, when PAP could be independent predicates, and show that the process of the gerund’s formation is not yet completed.

Keywords: древнерусский язык, gerunds, причастие, participle, Old Russian Language, деепричастие, Middle Russian, старорусский язык

Publication based on the results of: Systematic language convergence in a typological perspective (2023)