POSITION OF OPYAT’ AND TVOJ IN THE CLAUSE LINEAR STRUCTURE IN THE QUEEN OF SPADES

Abstract

The linear structure of nominal phrases with a possessive pronoun and verbal phrases with an adverb opyat’ ‘again’ in the text of The Queen of Spades by A.S. Pushkin is studied in comparison with the material of N.M. Karamzin’s story Island of Bornholm and a sample from the RNC, limited to 1738–1840. It is shown that changes in the structure of nominal and verbal phrases in Pushkin’s prose consisted not only in the “reduction of forms of qualitative assessment” and “compression” of the syntagma structure, as V.V. Vinogradov wrote, but also in the restructuring of their linear structure. The tendency towards the gradual transformation of the preposition of a possessive pronoun into a neutral, unmarked one, which is only outlined by Karamzin, in Pushkin’s prose gets the character of a completed process. The postposition of the word opyat’ to the finite verb, which was absolutely predominant in previous eras, in the texts of A.S. Pushkin clearly begins to give way to preposition; in Pushkin’s prose, a turning point of the process that led to the complete dominance of preposition opyat’ in modern Russian is recorded. In The Queen of Spades, there is also a tendency for the semantic factor to influence the choice of preposition/postposition of opyat’: in sentences with an agentive subject, realizing the perspective of the narrator observing the character, opyat’ appears in postposition to the finite verb; in sentences with a non-agent subject, realizing the perspective of the character, it appears in preposition. Other Pushkin’s texts, as well as modern speech, do not demonstrate such a tendency.