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American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East EuropeanLanguages is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavic and East European Journal.The innovation of the so-called genitive-accusative is one of the classic problems of Slavic philology and linguistics, and, although its chronology is generally well known, its interpretation remains controversial. Presented here is a methodological study of the genitive-accusative in Old Russian and Old Church Slavonic, focusing on the question of how the innovation of the genitive-accusative should be interpreted in its larger morphosyntactic context, and, in particular, on how Old Russian texts can, and cannot, appropriately be used to document the history of the genitive-accusative.By "genitive-accusative" will be meant any accusative case form that is identical to the genitive case form of the corresponding paradigm, for example the pronoun ego in 1. HIcxie3HIeT PHM; ero noKpoeT MpaK rny6oofii (Pugkin, "Liciniju," 1815).The "genitive" in "genitive-accusative" refers to the morphological form, which is, historically at least, genitive, and the "accusative" part of "genitiveaccusative" indicates the syntactic case usage, which in (1) is accusative, because the pronoun ego is a direct object of a verb noxpoeT that we know to govern the accusative case. (That is, if darkness were to cover not Rome but the earth or land, it would be noKpoeT 3eMjmo and not *noKpoeT 3eMJI.)The genitive-accusative arose pre-historically in Slavic, apparently first in the declension of certain pronouns but soon affecting not only pronouns but also nouns. In its earliest stage, the noun genitive-accusative was restricted to the masculine singular of human-referential o-stems and jo-stems, but, as is indicated in very rough outline in (2), later stages involved extensions first into the masculine plural and then into other plurals, as well as referential extension from persons to animals.
