The early East Slavic past tense system

The aim of the present project is to explore the semantic and morphosyntactic evolution of the East Slavic finite preterit forms in the 11th -15th centuries. The proposed research should result in a book providing a comprehensive analysis of the semantics and use of the Old Russian past tense forms as well as a new survey of the history of the Old Russian past tense system. The monograph is intended to be published in the ongoing series "The Historical Grammar of Old Russian Language," edited by V. B. Krys`ko. The need for a new careful investigation dedicated to the above subject is emphasized by the fact that in the last half-century no special monograph has appeared in this domain of Slavic linguistics. Therefore, the considerable theoretical advances in diachronical linguistics of recent decades had hardly any effect on the studies devoted to the semantics of Old Russian verb tenses. One of the major intentions of the proposed work is to bridge the gap between Slavic historical linguistics and modern theoretical studies. The research to be conducted will be based on the functional approach to the analysis of grammatical forms, which in my opinion accounts for the semantics of the Old Russian past tense forms better than other theoretical frameworks. The discourse-pragmatic analysis, which has proved particularly helpful in the examination of the use of the Old Russian tenses, will be largely applied in the study. The research will be also typologically oriented; cross-linguistic data pertaining to grammaticalization processes are especially important. Additionally, I will use electronic corpora, particularly the annotated corpus of Old Russian texts. The study will be based on a large corpus of early East Slavic written monuments, including texts of all types: biblical and liturgical books, Old Russian translations from Greek, chronicles, juridical documents, birchbark letters, etc. The wide range of texts should allow me to analyze every preterit form in every possible type of context, in order to describe all of its various functions. The investigation will cover the period of the 11th -15th centuries, but some grammatical and semantic processes will be traced further - up to the present. The main issues that the research is intended to address are the following: the semantic and pragmatic properties of all the Old Russian past tenses in all types of texts (narrative and non-narrative, "bookish" and non-"bookish", original and translated); participial constructions denoting past-time events; the synonymy of various past tense forms and their functional distribution; the correlation between Church Slavonic texts and the supposed colloquial language system and the penetration of colloquial language elements into the "bookish" texts; the diachronical development of individual grammatical forms and the past tense system in general.