On the Nominative with Infinitive: Notes in the Margins of the Domostroj

ABSTRACT The paper deals with Nom. object construction attested historically in East Slavic and Middle Russian texts, as well as in some modern dialects of the North and North West. Using the 16th-century Domostroj as the starting point for the discussion, the article focusses on the fact that Nom.+Inf. is associated with the legal genre. This presupposes its oral origin and sheds a new light on the possible evolution of this construction. It is argued that the transitive infinitive construction has a non-prototypical status in relation to the finite clause. The non-prototypicality comes from the modal semantics and the irrealis nature of the infinitive and the oblique Dat. subject. The nouns of the feminine *a-stem declension due to their evolution are especially predisposed to the Nom. form in infinitive construction. The opposition between the Nom. and the Acc. in this declension is weak. At the time when the Gen.-Acc. arose as a marker of morphological animacy, *a-stem nouns were pulled in the animacy opposition as well. The Nom. form became a variant of the Acc. for such nouns, by analogy to the Nom.-Acc. syncretism in other declensions and despite the fact that they had a separate Acc. form.