VARIABILITY OF PRESENT TENSE FORMS OF THE VERB BYT’ ‘TO BE’ IN THE DIALECT CORPUS OF THE VILLAGE OF SPIRIDONOVA BUDA (ZLYNKOVSKIJ DISTRICT, BRYANSK REGION): A PROBLEM AT THE INTERSECTION OF GRAMMAR AND SOCIOLINGUISTICS

In the dialects of the Russian-Belarusian borderland, the verb byt’ ‘to be’ in the present tense is represented by a set of short (e, ё) and full forms (ecть, ёсць, etc.). This article investigates the variability of these forms in the dialect corpus of the village of Spiridonova Buda (Zlynkovskij District, Bryansk Region) and in the National Corpus of the Belarusian Language. The study focuses on sociolinguistic, grammatical, and areal issues. The study will show the distribution of short and full variants across the territory of Russian and Belarusian dialects. The dialect of Spiridonova Buda is based on Belarusian but has been strongly influenced by Russian for centuries. The analysis shows that in this borderland dialect, the effects of priming and code-switching influence the choice of verb forms. However, the issue is not limited to sociolinguistics — it also has a grammatical dimension: the full form tends to appear in existential constructions, while the short form is associated with grammatical contexts centered around the possessive meaning.