ZERO FORMS IN MORPHOLOGICAL PARADIGMS: THE VERB “BE” IN RUSSIAN

This paper offers a corpus analysis of the Russian verb быть ‘be’ which has an abnormal present tense paradigm including a zero form ØBE.PRES and overt forms естьBE.PRES and сутьBE.PRES which do not discriminate person and number and are distributed syntactically. I discuss different approaches to the grammar of быть and argue that Apresjan’s model which recognizes ØBE.PRES, естьBE.PRES and сутьBE.PRES as parts of one and the same lemma is superior to alternative models splitting быть split into two lemmas representing copula vs content verb ‘be’. The peripheral status of overt present BE-forms compared with ØBE.PRES in the Russian National Corpus is confirmed by three measures: 1) dispersion of texts where a BE-form occurs; 2) uneven coverage in different persons and numbers; 3) ratio of copular uses vs content verb uses. 1–2 person present tense BE-forms attested in RNC are internal borrowings from Old Russian and Old Church Slavonic, while естьBE.PRES and сутьBE.PRES are inherited 3rd person elements which take over 1–2 person uses. The historical 3Pl суть is redundant in a system, where a more frequent 3rd person form есть is licensed in the plural: it survives by a minority of speakers either as an optional 3Pl copula in formal discourse or as an emphatic copula in oral discourse. The form естьBE.PRES occurs in all persons and numbers both as content verb and as copula but is underrepresented as 3Pl copula: this gap is filled by ØBE.PRES. The frequency of the zero copula ØBE.PRES can be measured in corpora without syntactic annotation on the basis of systemic proportion between present vs past tense uses of быть and on the basis of approximation samples for contexts where overt copulas alternate with ØBE.PRES.