고대러시아어 시제 체계 변화의 통사적 결과

Abstract

This paper argues that the early loss of old synthetic past tenses such as aorist and imperfect in Old Russian resulted in various syntactic properties of the East Slavic languages, which have not been linked to the tense system change in the literature. I analyze the loss of synthetic past tenses as reflecting tense feature weakening in T0, which is directly related to the lack of V-to-T movement and verb-adjacent clitics in Old Russian. There also arose an ambiguity in terms of the interpretability of agreement features in the be-auxiliary in the old perfect tense, due to the loss of the synthetic past tenses. This ambiguity triggered a subject reanalysis of the be-auxiliary on the model of the surface string in third person perfect tense, in which the be-auxiliary was always null. The be-auxiliary-as-subject was lost as a result of the competition with strong subject pronouns. I identify the subject reanalysis of the be-auxiliary as the loss of referential null subjects. Thus, the tense system change is indirectly responsible for the loss of the be-auxiliary and referential null subjects. Cross-linguistic evidence also supports this conclusion: Bulgarian still uses old synthetic past tenses and also maintains verb raising to T0, verb-adjacent clitics, the be-auxiliary, and null subjects. Polish and Czech, which lost aorist about 300 years later than Russian, do not have verb raising and verb-adjacent clitics that are directly related to the tense feature, but maintains those syntactic features that are indirectly related to T0, i.e., the be-auxiliary and null subjects.