Verbs meaning ‘know’ in Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian writing: Distributive, quantitative and semantic properties

Abstract

The article presents the first attempt of a distributive and quantitative analysis of the lexico-semantic series in the Old Russian language based on three multi-genre subcorpora of the historical corpus “Manuscript” (manuscripts.ru): lists of the Gospels, menaia, and chronicles. The authors made a correlation between the software processing of the diachronic corpus of data and their historical and linguistic status. The semantic relations between the verbs with the general meaning ‘know’ in the Old Russian language are considered: věděti, vdati, znati. Their substitution in the modern Russian standard by only the verb znat’ raises the question about this lexical group’s evolutionary dynamics. The authors established that the entire series belongs to the original lexical system, although the verb vědati was not found in Old Slavonic manuscripts and became widespread in Old Russian sources, both colloquial and literary. The analysis proves that the verb vědati in the Old Russian written sources acts as a substitute for the athematic verb věděti. The revealed quantitative bigram-indicators made it possible to establish contrasting collocations with the verbs věděti and vědati, on the one hand, and with the verb znati, on the other. Among the collocates of the verb znati, there were neither abstract nouns nor collocates that attach propositions. Distributive areas of the synonymy distribution in the verb row were found, which reflected the start of diachronic competition in the chain of lexemes. As a method for assessing the proximity of the bigrams’ components (analyzed verbs and their collocates), the authors used the statistical measure T-score and the r-Pearson correlation coefficient to determine the distribution’s degree series mutual correspondence.