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Post‐verbal subjects in early east slavonic
Author(s) -
Turner Sarah
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
transactions of the philological society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.333
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-968X
pISSN - 0079-1636
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-968x.2006.00163.x
Subject(s) - linguistics , interpretation (philosophy) , verb , subject (documents) , sentence , phenomenon , history , perspective (graphical) , grammar , set (abstract data type) , order (exchange) , slavic languages , dependent clause , philosophy , computer science , artificial intelligence , epistemology , finance , library science , economics , programming language
In Contemporary Standard Russian (CSR) the subject typically appears before the verb (SV order). The high proportion of clauses in which the verb appears before the subject (VS order) in some early medieval sources of East Slavonic provenance is striking by comparison. This paper investigates the phenomenon against the background of the complex linguistic situation of the period. It uses the concepts of Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) as set out in the Academy Grammar of Russian (Kovtunova 1980: 190–214) as basic tools for analysis and finds that, with a slight expansion of one of its central ideas, FSP can account for many of the VS orders in the medieval material. It suggests that clause patterns which resist interpretation in these terms can be understood as features characteristic of the different text types proposed by Benveniste (1966: 238–42) and Weinrich (1971).