The be-auxiliary's categorial status in Old Russian

Abstract

This article proposes that the present tense forms of thebe-auxiliarybyti(AUX) in Old Russian should be identified as weak pronouns, based on their prosodic, morphological, and syntactic properties. The loss ofAUXin Old Russian, which distinguishes East Slavic from West and South Slavic languages, is ascribed to the competition betweenAUXand strong subject pronouns as a consequence of the reanalysis ofAUXas a weak subject pronoun. This reanalysis was triggered by the early loss of synthetic past tenses in Old Russian. TheAUX's position to the right of pronominal clitics indicates that theAUXremains in its initial merge position either as an auxiliary verb or as a subject pronoun. The co-occurrence ofAUXin situand a null subject in Old Russian implies that rich verbal agreement and null subjects are unrelated with verb raising to I-0.