Prodajutsja dva bol’šix stola. SYNCHRONY ASSISTED BY DIACHRONY. About the usefulness of the diachronic approach to explain some difficult grammatical processes in contemporary Russian

Until the beginning of the 20th century the study of language was considered just one thing: the history of a language was not opposed to the study of a language at one particular moment. The difference between synchrony and diachrony established by Saussure radically changed the situation, putting synchrony at the center of linguistics. However, the legitimate distinction between the two linguistic approaches imperceptibly became opposed.

Meanwhile, when we do encounter diachrony in synchrony, diachrony appears as chaos produced by a microsystem in transformation process. This then justifies the introduction of the diachronic approach. There are many examples of the benefits of the diachronic approach when it comes to clarifying some of the more dubious grammatical fields of contemporary Russian. This paper introduces one of those examples: the analysis of the choice of the form of the adjective in numeral syntagma, containing the numerals dva/ dve, tri, č etyre in the nominative case in contemporary Russian. By proposing to consider the forms of the noun after dva/dve, tri, č etyre not as a genitive but rather as a “paucal”, historically originating from the extended dual, this article demonstrates that the structure of phrases like Prodajutsja dva bol′šix stola which cannot be successfully analyzed in terms of synchrony could really be explained in terms of diachrony, if we suppose that those phrases stem from two different syntactic structures. These structures — personal or impersonal numeral clauses — formerly used for distinct pragmatic purposes, fused afterwards and were then structurally transformed, which has led to the current hesitation between the genitive and the nominative case of adjectives.

With the examples of the usefulness of diachrony as a support to establish order and logic in the changing fields of language which are still in transformation, this paper aims to show that it is high time to perceive both linguistic approaches as complementary.