Prepositional phrase vs. bare instrumental

Abstract

The trajectory of motion in Russian can be expressed by a prepositional phrase with the noun in the dative case or a bare NP in the instrumental case. It is argued that the latter construction is falling into disuse, along with the general trend toward analyticity in Slavic languages (Comrie et al. 1996). In this paper, I present a corpus-based diachronic study of the distribution of the two constructions with respect to various variables, such as noun frequency, the conceptualization of the Ground object, verb aspect, and others. I provide an argument that the bare NP construction is going through lexicalization as an adverb.

Dative radial category in Old Church Slavonic and Modern Russian

“…Moreover, constructions with a bare case and with a preposition are not interchangeable. As several researchers (Abraham 2006, Philippova 2017) have shown, the constructions differ with regard to their frequency and their distribution in a corpus.…”