The Processes of Grammaticalization and Lexicalization in the Russian Verb System

Abstract

The article presents the processes of grammaticalisation and lexicalisation that have taken place in the Russian verb system in the course of its historical development. The relevance of this problem is conditioned by the ability of grammaticalization theory to present the regularities of grammatical system formation in different languages. The article represents a brief study on the issues of grammaticalisation in Russian philology and different researchers’ understanding of this process. Methods of observation, description and classification as well as structural and quantitative ones were implemented in the course of the study. The application of the theory of grammaticalisation to the Russian verb revealed the main directions of grammaticalisation that explain the formation of various verb grammatical categories, grammatical forms and grammatical indicators. Diachronic analysis of the Russian verb categories and forms showed various factors of grammaticalization corresponding to the general language trend from specific to abstract: 1) transformation of notional words into grammatical indicators (the former encclitic form of the reflexive pronoun – sya becomes a post-fix indicator of reflexiveness and passive voice; phonetically reduced verb byti becomes a particle indicator of the subjunctive mood); 2) the transition of one verb form to another (participles with suffix -l, which were part of the analytic forms of the Perfect, Plusquamperfect and Subjunctive Mood replaced the past tense form in the temporal paradigm of personal forms); 3) grammaticalization of collocations (preservation of the transformed form of the future compound); 4) generalisation of meaning (the grammatical category of aspect is based on the semantic category of limitedness/unlimitedness of action, a universal feature applied to all verbs); 5) filling lexical gaps in the system of form coinage (leading to appearance of future participles); 6) transformation of notional words into form words (onversion of adverbial participles into prepositions). The study has also revealed the opposite process in the verb system, that is, lexicalisation of the grammatical form of the perfect (and plusquamperfect). The loss of the perfect as a grammatical form has occurred, but the dual temporal semantics of the perfect itself is expressed by the short and long perfect participles, the personal forms of the perfect and imperfect verb with the favorable lexical meaning of the verb forms or due to the appropriate context and situation.