Na with the Accusative: Marking the Addressee of Speech in some Western and Southern Russian Dialects

Abstract

In this paper we will consider a construction with a preposition na (on) and an addressee of speech with verbs govorit’ (to speak) and skazat’ (to say) in some Southern Russian and Western Russian dialects. In standard Russian, the semantic role of the addressee of speech is marked with the dative case. We will focus on the examples from Russian dialects that use a different marker of the addressee of speech: the preposition na with the accusative case. The research is based on the data extracted from several dialectal corpora, including the Rogovatka corpus, (Starooskolsky district, Belgorod region) the Malinino corpus (Khlevinsky district, Lipetsk region), and the Opochka corpus (Opochecky district, Pskov region). Thus, we analyzed Western Russian (Opochka corpus) and Southern Russian data (Rogovatka and Malinino corpus). Constructions with the preposition na can have several meanings that can be distinguished into 2 groups: contexts with invectives and contexts that contain an impulse (motivation) to action. In the paper, we will consider these two groups of meanings as three stages of a semantic shift. We can suggest that the metaphorical transition of the construction occurs as follows: 1. A surface of a real physical object; 2. A sound wave on a surface, in which the addressee of speech acts with a component of aggression; 3. Influence and control of this addressee.