LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF THE ENTRIES FROM THE 12TH CENTURY IN THE MOSCOW CHRONICLE OF THE LATE 15TH CENTURY

The article is an analysis of the language used in the 12th-century entries of the Moscow Chronicle of the late 15th century, similar to the Kievan and Suzdal Chronicles. It discusses rather frequent phenomena of various kinds: the place of the enclitic CѦ, the use of the first person singular personal pronoun, conditional, object and temporal conjunctions, constructions with the particle ДА, the correlation of the verbs -ИТИ and -ѢХАТИ. Also mentioned are the behaviour of the forms of the dual, the use of the verbs СЪКОУПИТИ(СѦ)/ СЪКОПИТИ(СѦ)/ СЪВЪКОУПИТИ(СѦ) and the nouns СТРЫИ/ ДѦДѦ. Unintentional effects (for example, placement of CѦ), purposeful editorial substitutions (mainly lexical) and grammatical form choices are also taken into account. The results demonstrate that, despite the influence of the protograph of the Kievan and Suzdal annals, the language of parallel entries of the Moscow Chronicle exhibits greater affinity to Russian annals after the 15th century than to Old Russian annals. Consequently, when considering a “better” reading in an Old Russian chronicle, it is mandatory to take into account the probability of later additions and the very possibility of the existence of such a form or construction in the language of the 12th century.