Post‐verbal subjects in early east slavonic

Abstract

AbstractIn Contemporary Standard Russian (CSR) the subject typically appears before the verb (SV order). The high proportion of clauses in which the verb appears before the subject (VS order) in some early medieval sources of East Slavonic provenance is striking by comparison. This paper investigates the phenomenon against the background of the complex linguistic situation of the period. It uses the concepts of Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) as set out in the Academy Grammar of Russian (Kovtunova 1980: 190–214) as basic tools for analysis and finds that, with a slight expansion of one of its central ideas, FSP can account for many of the VS orders in the medieval material. It suggests that clause patterns which resist interpretation in these terms can be understood as features characteristic of the different text types proposed by Benveniste (1966: 238–42) and Weinrich (1971).