Reconstruction and idiomaticity: The origin of Russian verbless clauses reconsidered

Abstract

AbstractThere are three types of Russian verbless clauses, which emerged through the ellipsis of the copula and other (full) verbs. This paper provides arguments against the hypothesis that they owe their existence to contact with Uralic languages. It argues that Finnic verbless clauses developed in parallel or even later than their Russian counterparts, and that the verbless clauses in Samoyedic languages, which preserve ancient Proto-Uralic features and use predicate nominal suffixes, differ structurally too much from those in Russian to represent likely models. It is argued that verbless clauses can naturally emerge when the meaning expressed by a frequent and semantically bleached verb is also included in the meaning of the phrase dependent on it. Other factors (contact-induced change, pragmatic and contextual factors) can support the emergence of – usually highly idiomatic – verbless clause constructions.