Reconstruction and idiomaticity: The origin of Russian verbless clauses reconsidered

Abstract

There are three types of Russian verbless clauses, which emerged through the ellipsis of the copula and other (full) verbs. This paper provides arguments against the hypothesis that they owe their existence to contact with Uralic languages. It argues that Finnic verbless clauses developed in parallel or even later than their Russian counterparts, and that the verbless clauses in Samoyedic languages, which preserve ancient Proto-Uralic features and use predicate nominal suffixes, differ structurally too much from those in Russian to represent likely models. It is argued that verbless clauses can naturally emerge when the meaning expressed by a frequent and semantically bleached verb is also included in the meaning of the phrase dependent on it. Other factors (contact-induced change, pragmatic and contextual factors) can support the emergence of – usually highly idiomatic – verbless clause constructions.

Peculiarities and origins of the Russian referential system

“…and now they see-pres-3o.3pl.s 'And now they see…' 22 Kopotev (2007Kopotev ( , 2011 provides a critical analysis of the idea of the Russian copula-free nominal clauses resulting from Finnish influence, which is related to the research question of the present article. 23 An impressionistic evaluation of the data in Kuznecova (ed.)…”

“…p. 333-334 in the same publication). 18 Zaliznjak (2008) points out that the expansion of subject pronouns and the loss of copulas happened, in the first place, in nominal clauses (schematically, the pattern am not your sister was replaced by I not your sister), and was only later extended to verbal clauses, including the perfect/past and present tense clauses; on nominal clauses also see Jakobson (1971), Xaburgaev (1978), and Kopotev (2011).…”

“…On the other hand, many of these suggestions are not sufficiently conclusive, cf. Dahl & Koptjevskaja-Tamm (1992), Kopotev (2007Kopotev ( , 2011 22 .…”