On the grammaticalization of past passive participles in Middle Russian

Abstract

The article analyzes the functioning of past passive participles (PPPs) in the preterit meaning used without auxiliary in seventeenth-century Russian on the data of private letters and the first Russian handwritten newspaper Kuranty. A grammatical interpretation of this use is proposed in the paper. In the course of the evolution of the old temporal system, the PPP started grammaticalizing and became a specialized form with preterit meaning and no obligatory expression of the subject. Different types of constructions with a PPP in this function (the PPP agrees with the subject or appears in the neuter form, the direct object being nominative or accusative) reflect different stages of the grammaticalization process, which was not accomplished in the history of Russian, but didreach the final phase in Polish.