The so-called possessive perfect in North Russian and the Circum-Baltic area. A diachronic and areal account

Abstract

The paper provides a historical and areal investigation of the North Russian perfect, often referred to as the “possessive perfect”. This perfect is encoded by a periphrastic predication consisting of a copular auxiliary and a past passive participle in an invariant form; the non-prototypical subject is case-marked with an adessive-like PP while the object is assigned the nominative or, in some varieties, accusative case; contrary to several scholars there is no trace of ergativity. As to the diachrony, the paper represents a case study on the rise of non-prototypical subjects and the development from subjects to objects. The historical investigation of the perfect reveals that etymologically it is neither related to the possessive construction of the mihi est type (as has been commonly assumed before) nor to a passive. Instead, the development out of a patient-oriented resultative construction based on the copula with a predicative resultative participle is suggested. The adessive-like PP (often functioning as a new dative in East Slavic) enters this construction as an adverbial referring to a participant that is physically or mentally affected by the resultant state but develops later exclusively the meaning of the agent of the preceding action and, subsequently, acquires behavioral subject properties. The areal perspective of the investigation reveals two hotbeds of expansion. First, the early sequence of changes leading from the patient-oriented resultative construction to the impersonal perfect with a number of syntactic active properties, and encompassing such languages as Polish, all East Slavic, Baltic and Fennic languages, seems to have been influenced by Polish. Second, the later developments consisting of the incorporation of the free-dative-like adverbial into the construction, the acquisition of agent meaning, and subsequently, subject properties has been instigated by North Russian. From North Russian dialect area this construction spread to such languages as Standard Russian, Estonian, Karelian, Votian and Latvian with a decreasing degree of grammaticalization. Both areal and diachronic perspectives allow equilibrating areal and internal triggers for the described developments.