Le développement de la phrase nominale dans les écorces de bouleau de Novgorod

The Development of Non-Verbal Sentences in the Birchbark Letters of Novgorod : Copula, Auxiliary and Person Marker The verb 'be', copula or auxiliary, is almost constantly absent in normal speech for the third person in Old Novgorodian. For the first and second persons, 'be' is expressed when there is no subject pronoun, absent when there is a subject pronoun. When 'be' and a subject pronoun are found together, there is a clear emphasis. This complementary distribution shows that 'be' is, as the personal pronoun, a person marker, and does not function any longer as a verb. The personal pronoun is the strongest person marker, the copula / auxiliary the weakest: the usual variant in the llth and 12th centuries is далъ есмь, виноватъ есмь (copula-auxiliary / no pronoun), and the variant а далъ, а виноватъ (pronoun / no copula-auxiliary) is used when there is an emphasis on the subject, it is the marked variant. This explains the existence of periphrastic forms ('conditional 2' or pluperfect) with the auxiliary where it should not appear. It is also argued that the development of non-verbal sentences, which is usually ascribed to Finno-Ugric influence, is in part due to this state of affairs : since non-verbal sentences did exist in Indo-European languages, this type was inherited in Slavic, but in Russian the marked variant (pronoun / no copula-auxiliary) was generalized and became the unmarked one. The internal dynamic of change seems to be an important part of this evolution, all the more so since in the Novgorod area, the substratum is Fennic, and Fennic languages, alone in the Finno-Ugric languages, have a copula and an auxiliary for compound tenses, which they acquired under the influence of neighbouring Indo-European languages: this makes it difficult to ascribe the Old Novgorodian facts to Fennic influence

Copula (linguistics) · Linguistics · Personal pronoun · Pronoun · Reflexive pronoun · Subject pronoun · Verb · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy · Psychology