ON PREDICATIVE vs. ATTRIBUTIVE PARTICIPLES IN OLD RUSSIAN: INDECLINABLE PARTICIPLES

This paper argues that in Old Russian and other Slavic languages, including Old Church Slavonic, predicative participles, unlike attributive ones, tended to lose agreement for case with their subject. Four syntactical constructions were especially favourable for the loss of case agreement: infinitival constructions with participles, coreferential with dative or accusative agents, accusativus cum participio, absolute constructions with implicit subject, and the dative absolute construction. The feature common to all these constructions is that the subject of the participle is different from that of the main clause. Thus, in different-subject constructions predicative participles most easily became indeclinable. Besides, in the absolute constructions with an implicit subject, infinitival constructions and accusativus cum participio, the subject was not expressed phonologically and its absence was yet another trigger of the loss of agreement. Indeclinable active participles in infinitival constructions and accusativus cum participio are already attested in Old Church Slavonic, where short (nominal) participial forms, used attributively, still agree fully with their subjects. The loss of agreement for case in the absolute construction with an implicit subject is attested in Old Russian as early as in the 12th century and in the dative absolute construction — in the 13th century. The early dating of the indeclinable forms shows that their emergence was caused by the opposition of predicative and attributive participles and not by the loss of the short (nominal) form adjectival declension.