Historical Development of the Old Church Slavonic tŭ-aorist

Abstract

The present paper investigates the historical development of the Old Church Slavonic tŭ (tъ)-aorist, which is restricted to the 2nd and 3rd singular forms in the place of person and number inflection, and to some resonant stem in the domain. Crucial issues, such as (i) how to classify those anomalous aorists, (ii) what morphological status to be assigned to the specific morpheme –tъ, and (iii) how to motivate it, have not reached agreed-upon conclusion, have been addressed with a detailed preliminary study of the aorist system in Old Church Slavonic. First, I suppose that either the time span between developments of root aorist and sigmatic aorist was so short or the overlapping period was so long that two distinct formations can be seen as subject to a single rule. Therefore, there is no contradiction in using terms like sigmatic-root and sigmatic-dental aorists. That is, tъ-aorist does not necessarily have to be rigorously classified either as root or as sigmatic aorist. Second, the consonant t in this specific aorist, cognate with the Germanic dental preterite (Meillet 1902), is in and of itself fitting with the tense denoting purpose. Third, the fact that the phoneme –t(+V)- was used fairly throughout the 2/3 Sg, Du, and Pl verbal paradigms provides motivates the use of tъ. In addition, Late Common Slavic speakers must have felt the need of filling the zero suffixes for 2/3 Sg aorists with something to make the forms more like a real word.