Special Issue: Russian Historical Morphosyntax in the Light of Language Contact

Abstract

This issue of Scando-Slavica is devoted to the topic of morphosyntactic change in Russian in the light of language contact. It is the outcome of two linguistics panels at the 21 Conference of Scandinavian Slavists that took place in August 2019 at the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu campus. The papers examine various aspects and possible morphosyntactic consequences of convergence during the development of the Russian language pointing to historical or prehistoric language contacts in the area of Northern East Slavic. While some papers deal with the phenomena that make Russian stand out against the background of even its closest relatives and may thus have been triggered by such contacts, others address broader issues and consider theoretical implications of contact phenomena, the specific contact configurations, and the interplay between internal and external factors in morphosyntactic processes. Andersen’s article addresses the origin and development of definiteness marking in the adjective phrase in Germanic, Baltic and Slavic, and considers three possible hypotheses of prehistoric bilingual language contact in various configurations, as well as areal convergence. The examination of the definite paradigms in all three language families at the earliest historical stages leads Andersen to the conclusion that they are archaisms rather than innovations. In the final analysis, Andersen prefers the idea of direct borrowing of definiteness marking from Germanic. He explains that contacts between Germanic, Baltic and Slavic went on for a very long time, occurring before the invasion of the Huns in 375 A.D. The Slavic and Baltic subordinators (the term he uses for the PIE pronoun *-yo attested in Indo-Iranian) changed into definite markers because of the contacts with East Germanic groups before then, and their spread continued thereafter. One part of Andersen’s article deals with the terminology and methodological issues of language contact. He elaborates on the idea of functional equivalence in language contact and stresses the importance of accounting for innovations on the level of the speaker in order to produce a realistic explanation of the process. Penkova investigates the problem of the periphrastic future formation with inchoative auxiliaries during the Middle Russian period. Leaning on