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The be ‐auxiliary's categorial status in Old Russian 1
Author(s) -
Jung Hakyung
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/stul.12136
Subject(s) - linguistics , pronoun , verb , subject (documents) , merge (version control) , subject pronoun , slavic languages , personal pronoun , raising (metalworking) , history , psychology , philosophy , mathematics , computer science , geometry , library science , information retrieval
This article proposes that the present tense forms of the be ‐auxiliary byti ( AUX ) in Old Russian should be identified as weak pronouns, based on their prosodic, morphological, and syntactic properties. The loss of AUX in Old Russian, which distinguishes East Slavic from West and South Slavic languages, is ascribed to the competition between AUX and strong subject pronouns as a consequence of the reanalysis of AUX as a weak subject pronoun. This reanalysis was triggered by the early loss of synthetic past tenses in Old Russian. The AUX 's position to the right of pronominal clitics indicates that the AUX remains in its initial merge position either as an auxiliary verb or as a subject pronoun. The co‐occurrence of AUX in situ and a null subject in Old Russian implies that rich verbal agreement and null subjects are unrelated with verb raising to I 0 .