Everything old is new again: Another look into the history of Russian adjectives

Abstract

The history of the adjective in Russian manifests the convergence of its declensional paradigm with the declension of non-personal pronouns. The present paper focuses on the sg. masc. ending -ogo, the syncretic Gen.-Acc. that replaces the corresponding ending -ago in Old East Slavic, the ending -ago being the result of prehistoric compounding of the short adjective and the anaphoric pronoun jego. While the development of the adjectival paradigm, separate from that originally shared with nouns, took the compounding route at some stage, it may have not been quite linear, at least in the Acc. case. It is hypothesized that the ending -ogo was not a new substitute for the old Gen. -ago, but rather a variant Acc. form used since antiquity to refer to persons. It may have already emerged in short adjectives, by direct analogy to kogo (Gen.-Acc. of the interrogative-indefinite kŭto ‘who’), independently of the compounding, in the same manner in which the Gen.-Acc. of non-personal pronouns arose. It is proposed that the compound form marked definiteness, and was associated with long active participles, with transitivity and subject-object distinction especially, while -ogo marked personhood in pronouns and in certain pronoun-like adjectives while they were still part of the nominal paradigm.