ON THE HISTORY OF THE OLD RUSSIAN VERB byvati (Aspectual Semantics)

The paper deals with the aspectual semantics of the verb byvati in its history from Early Old Russian up to today. The specific features of byvat’ in Modern Russian, as distinct from the other iterative verbs like khazhivat’ etc., derived from imperfective verbal stems during the Late Old Russian period, are conditioned by the fact that byvati was an ancient Common Slavic imperfective verb, derived from byti, which was neutral in its aspect, i.e. could be used both as perfective and imperfective. In Early Old Russian, byvati had both iterative and durative meanings, but its usage in progressive contexts was archaic and preserved especially in the Church Slavonic tradition. The meaning of general fact in the Past, especially in negative contexts, was quite possible. From the 15th century, when new iterative verbs appeared, they influenced byvati: the use of all these verbs in the Past tense became similar to that of their following history. But, byvati preserved its non-iterative usage up to the end of the 18th century, in the Northern Russian dialects and folklore texts up to today.

The history of the verb vidati was similar: in Old Russian it was also an imperfective verb derived from dual aspectual viděti. The verb slykhati emerged later; in its usage, the analogy with vidati played the most important role. But, in contrast with byvat’, both vidat’and slykhat’still can indicate a single non-iterative action.