ACCENTOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE WORD ILI DURING THE 17th—20th CENTURIES: CORPUS EVIDENCE

The paper deals with chronology of the prosodic process of the Middle Russian word или becoming proclitic, then carrying stress on the fi rst syllable in some contexts. This phenomenon, discovered by Andrey Zaliznyak, is a part of a more general tendency to the accentological weakening of conjunctions and prepositions in Russian. To investigate the initial stages of this process, I use not only the evidence of accentuated sources, but also texts where Wackernagel clitics help to establish the phonological status of the word. For the period from the 1740s to the early 20th century, I use the (accentual syllabic) poetry included in the Russian National Corpus (RNC). I found out that the clitic variant of или emerged not later than the mid-17th century, but gained predominance only in the subsequent century. The archaic stress или was used by the poets of the “Golden Age” (including Alexander Pushkin), but it was overlooked by linguists and is not noticed by nowadays speakers.