PARTITIVE GENITIVE IN RUSSIAN CHRONICLES AND COMTEMPORARY DIALECTS

The alternative binding of the two objective cases, the accusative and the genitive one, pertained to many Russian verbs in the period of the 11th through 17th century. Drawing on the recording archives of the modern dialects of Archangelsk, the article examines the examples of the genitive case in the verbs belonging to the semantic classes that have nearly or totally lost this kind of binding in the modern Russian literary language. Among them are predicates with a limited genitive binding potential: verbs of perception, verbs of defense, speech, writing, and possession as well as verbs of emotions, mental states and concrete physical actions. The relatively more broad usage of the objective genitive case in the modern dialects can in many cases be explained historically, i.e. this phenomenon reflects a more archaic state of the dialectal syntax. The modern dialectal data is compared with the texts of the Russian chronicles. On the whole, in both cases the patterns of verb semantic classes that have alternative accusative or genitive binding coincide. Some overlaps at the level of lexical units are also observed.