TY - JOUR

T1 - The Instrumental Case in the Diachrony of Russian Reflexive Verbs of Emotion

T2 - From Cause to Content

AU - Ovsjannikova, Maria

AU - Say, Sergey

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2020, © 2020 The Association of Scandinavian Slavists and Baltologists. Copyright: Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PY - 2020/1/2

Y1 - 2020/1/2

N2 - Russian experiencer-subject reflexive verbs of emotion vary greatly in the syntactic encoding of their stimuli: poražatʹsja ‘be astonished’ takes the dative case, while obižat’sja ‘feel offended’ takes na ‘on’ + the accusative case, etc. Based on data from the Russian National Corpus, we show that, despite synchronic variegation, many reflexive verbs have been undergoing a unidirectional drift during the last three centuries: the instrumental encoding of the stimulus has gradually been giving way to lexically determined patterns. The use of the instrumental was motivated by its semantic profile: it was closely associated with the meaning of cause. This syntactic change echoes changes in the construal of the stimulus, whereby its cause-like components weaken and its content-like components come to the fore. The evidence in favour of this hypothesis includes the semantic differences between the instrumental case and the relevant encoding devices, a gradual decrease in the proportion of stimuli that are inanimate, the development of emotive meanings on the basis of physical meanings in individual verbs and lexicalization by which reflexive verbs become emancipated from their transitive counterparts. Semantic and syntactic scenarios in the development of reflexive verbs are later partially replicated by corresponding periphrastic participial constructions.

AB - Russian experiencer-subject reflexive verbs of emotion vary greatly in the syntactic encoding of their stimuli: poražatʹsja ‘be astonished’ takes the dative case, while obižat’sja ‘feel offended’ takes na ‘on’ + the accusative case, etc. Based on data from the Russian National Corpus, we show that, despite synchronic variegation, many reflexive verbs have been undergoing a unidirectional drift during the last three centuries: the instrumental encoding of the stimulus has gradually been giving way to lexically determined patterns. The use of the instrumental was motivated by its semantic profile: it was closely associated with the meaning of cause. This syntactic change echoes changes in the construal of the stimulus, whereby its cause-like components weaken and its content-like components come to the fore. The evidence in favour of this hypothesis includes the semantic differences between the instrumental case and the relevant encoding devices, a gradual decrease in the proportion of stimuli that are inanimate, the development of emotive meanings on the basis of physical meanings in individual verbs and lexicalization by which reflexive verbs become emancipated from their transitive counterparts. Semantic and syntactic scenarios in the development of reflexive verbs are later partially replicated by corresponding periphrastic participial constructions.

KW - cause

KW - diachrony

KW - instrumental case

KW - reflexive verbs

KW - Russian

KW - stimulus

KW - valency

KW - verbs of emotion

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85085029133&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/00806765.2020.1741029

DO - 10.1080/00806765.2020.1741029

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85085029133

VL - 66

SP - 118

EP - 143

JO - Scando-Slavica

JF - Scando-Slavica

SN - 0080-6765

IS - 1

ER -