Diachronic Slavonic Syntax Gradual Changes in Focus Edited by Björn Hansen Jasmina Grković-Major WIENER SLAWISTISCHER ALMANACH SONDERBAND 74 MÜNCHEN - BERLIN - WIEN 2009 WIENER SLAWISTISCHER ALMANACH LINGUISTISCHE REIHE HERAUSGEGEBEN VON TILMANN REUTHER SONDERBAND 74, MÜNCHEN - BERLIN - WIEN 2009 VERLAG © 2009 bei Kubon & Sagner GmbH Heßstraße 39/41 Friedrichstraße 200 80798 München 10117 Berlin Telefon +49 (0)89 54 218-106 Telefax +49 (0)89 54 218-226 E-Mail: [email protected] Verlag Otto Sagner ist ein Imprint der Kubon & Sagner GmbH ISBN 978-3-86688-096-2 ISSN 0258-6835 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface 5 Hauke Bartels (Cottbus): Das (diachrone) Textkorpus der niedersorbischen Schriftsprache als Grundlage für Sprachdokumentation und Sprachwandelforschung 7 Jan Ivar Bjørnflaten (Oslo): Grammaticalization Theory and the Formation of Gerunds in Russian 19 Mojmír Dočekal (Brno): Negative Concord: from Old Church Slavonic to Contemporary Czech 29 Hanne Eckhoff and Dag Haug (Oslo): Aligning Syntax in Early New Testament Texts: the PROIEL Corpus 41 Mirjam Fried (Princeton/Prague): A Construction Grammar Approach to Grammatical Change 53 Jasmina Grković-Major (Novi Sad): The Role of Syntactic Transitivity in the Development of Slavic Syntactic Structures 63 Björn Hansen (Regensburg): Constructional Aspects of the Rise of Epistemic Sentence Adverbs in Russian 75 Hakyung Jung (Seoul): Preconditions and Motivations in the Grammaticalization of the North Russian Be-perfect 87 Petr Karlík (Brno): Old Czech Adjectives with the Meaning of Passive Potentials 99 Alexander Krasovitsky, Matthew Baerman, Dunstan Brown, Greville G. Corbett, Peter Williams (Guildford): Morphosyntactic Change in Russian: A Corpus-based Approach 109 Marija Lazar (Hamburg): Placement of the Reflexive sja in Russian Business Writing 121 Julia McAnallen (Berkeley): Developments in Predicative Possession in the History of Slavic 131 Krzysztof Migdalski (Wrocław/Connecticut): The Diachronic Syntax of Perfective Auxiliaries in Polish 143 Achim Rabus (Freiburg): Die Relativisatoren im Ruthenischen 155 Gilbert Rappaport (Austin): The Grammaticalization of the Category Masculine Personal in West Slavic 169 Radoslav Večerka (Brno): Entwicklungsvoraussetzungen und Triebkräfte der slavischen Syntax 181 Ljuba Veselinova (Stockholm): Standard and Special Negators in the Slavonic Languages: Synchrony and Diachrony 195 Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 74 (2009) 5-6 PREFACE The present volume is dedicated to the study of the gradualness of syntactic change in the Slavonic languages. Questions of diachronic changes in syntactic structures have always been an important field within Slavonic linguistics. In the last decades of the twentieth century, however, we witnessed an increasing dominance of synchronic linguistics leading to a shift away from diachronic syntax. The aim of this book is to give an overview of recent developments in the field emphasizing, thus, the importance of diachronic Slavonic syntax in general. The focus is on the mechanisms of syntactic change with special reference to intermediary steps and on the question of how these micro-changes can be detected empirically. The book contains works showing applications of new theoretical syntactic models to Slavonic languages on one hand, and articles presenting recent developments in the field of Historical Corpus Linguistics, on the other. The volume is open to diverging theories of syntactic structure and, therefore, reflects recent developments of functional frameworks like ‘Construction Grammar’ and ‘Grammaticalization Theory’, and also formal models like Generative Grammar. The syntactic structures addressed range from NP internal categories like gender, VP internal ones like analytical auxiliary constructions to the level of the clause (argument realization, modality, possession, negation) and, finally to the level of the complex sentence (gerunds, participles, relative clauses). Whereas the book has a narrow focus on the mechanisms of syntactic change and their empirical foundation, it tries to cover a wide range of languages including the major languages like Russian and also less used languages like Lower Sorbian, giving an adequate impression of the Slavonic language family as a whole. It contains individual studies on Russian, Czech, Ruthenian, Lower Sorbian, and Polish, and also includes general comparative resp. typological papers. The book’s seventeen contributions reflect the breadth and diversity of current research in Slavonic historical syntax. The title of the book deserves some explanatory remarks. We understand the term gradualness as the diachronic counterpart of synchronic gradience which, following Aarts (2007),1 comes in two types: 1) subsective gradience involves a single class of linguistic elements and allows for a particular element X from that category to be closer to the prototype of the category than some other element Y; 2) intersective gradience involves two categories and allows for less central members of a category to exhibit features of a neighbouring category. This view is in line with the Prague Functional School which propagated the idea that linguistic categories should be seen as formations with a compact centre and a gradual transition into a diffuse periphery which infiltrates into the peripheral domain of the next category (Daneš 1966).2 ________ 1 Aarts, Bas (2007). Syntactic Gradience: The nature of Grammatical Indeterminacy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2 Daneš, František (1966). The Relation of Centre and Periphery as a Language Universal, Travaux Linguistiques de Prague 2: Les problèmes du centre et la périphérie du système de la langue, 9-21. 6 Preface The volume is a collection of papers most of which were presented at the International Conference ‘Diachronic Syntax of the Slavonic Languages: Gradual Changes in Focus’, held at the University of Regensburg, Germany, 5-6 December 2008. The conference which was supported by the Regensburger Universitätsstiftung and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst DAAD was jointly organized by the Department of Slavonic Studies, University of Regensburg, Germany, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on the Ancient Languages and the Early Stages of Modern Languages of the Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, in cooperation with the Department for Serbian Language and Linguistics, University of Novi Sad, Serbia. Key note speakers were Mirjam Fried (Princeton/Prague), Jasmina Grković-Major (Novi Sad), Peter Kosta (Potsdam), Radoslav Večerka (Brno) and David Willis (Cambridge). Information about that conference can be found in LINGUIST List Vol-19-1572. Finally, we would like to thank Tilmann Reuther for including this volume in the series ‘Wiener Slawistischer Almanach – Sonderbände’. Björn Hansen and Jasmina Grković-Major Regensburg / Novi Sad Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 74 (2009) 7-18 Hauke Bartels DAS (DIACHRONE) TEXTKORPUS DER NIEDERSORBISCHEN SCHRIFTSPRACHE ALS GRUNDLAGE FÜR SPRACHDOKUMENTATION UND SPRACHWANDELFORSCHUNG Summary The present sociolinguistic situation of Lower Sorbian with a decreasing number of native speakers is one of the main reasons for the growing importance of an electronic textual corpus for linguistic research. After a short overview of the history, composition and previous use of the Lower Sorbian corpus this contribution focuses on the usefulness of corpus-based investigations into the history of the Lower Sorbian literary language, which is generally characterized by strong dynamics. Examples are given for different changes, sometimes showing the great but often opposing influence of important writers. But also long-term developments can be illustrated, e.g. the replacement of German loanwords for purist reasons. The few examples of the use of statistical means for corpus-based research into Lower Sorbian promise interesting insights into the changeable development of this Western Slavonic language over the last two centuries. 1. Das Textkorpus 1.1. Zu seiner Bedeutung für Forschungen zum Niedersorbischen Schon bald nach der Gründung der Cottbuser Zweigstelle für niedersorbische Forschun- gen des Sorbischen Instituts 1992 begann man dort mit dem Aufbau eines computerlesba- ren Textkorpus der niedersorbischen Schriftsprache. Dabei spielte nicht nur die allgemeine Entwicklung in der Sprachwissenschaft eine Rolle, die der Korpuslinguistik methodolo- gisch eine immer größere Relevanz zuschrieb. Vielmehr wuchs das Bewusstsein, dass in der besonderen soziolinguistischen Situation, in der sich das Niedersorbische befindet, ein Korpus möglicherweise bald die einzige zuverlässige Informationsquelle zum Sprachge- brauch sein könnte. In den 90er-Jahren des letzten Jahrhunderts wurden zwei soziolin- guistische Studien zum Sprachwechselprozess und zur Sprachsituation in der Niederlau- sitz durchgeführt. Dabei handelt es sich zum einen um eine Fallstudie zur zweisprachigen Gemeinde Drachhausen/Hochoza (Norberg 1996), zum anderen um eine breiter angelegte Untersuchung aus den Jahren 1993-1995 (Jodlbauer u.a. 2001). Der bereits lang an- dauernde Prozess des Übergangs vom Niedersorbischen zum Deutschen als Alltags- und vor allem als den Fortbestand auf „natürliche“ Weise sichernde Familiensprache war demnach auch in den letzten Dörfern des stetig schrumpfenden Sprachgebiets bis etwa Mitte der 1950er-Jahre vollzogen. Da es seitdem nicht gelungen ist, das Niedersorbische in seiner primären Existenzform, den Dialekten, zu revitalisieren – die jüngsten Sprecher, die die Sprache