NEGATION IN NON-VERBAL PREDICATES IN OLD RUSSIAN

 The paper examines the position of negation in non-verbal clauses with an adjectival, nominal or adverbial predicate in Old Russian. The Old Bulgarian Codex Suprasliensis, Old Russian chronicles and birchbark letters were analyzed, Old Russian data being compared with those from Old Bulgarian. It is shown that in Codex Suprasliensis, negation occurs adjacent either to the copula or to the predicative expression; negation of the copula occurs marginally more frequently than that of the predicative expression. In Old Russian texts, negation tends strongly to be used in front of the predicative expression and occurs before the copula only in two cases: 1) if the context is influenced by Church Slavonic (in Bible quotations etc.) or 2) if the sentence asserts that the presupposition is 
false and contrasts it to a true situation (from the speaker’s point of view). Thus, in Old Russian the position of negation in non-verbal clauses depended on its function: if the speaker intended to affirm an absence of an attribute, the negation preceded the predicative expression; if he intended to deny the presupposition, the copula was negated.