KON’JAČKU BY, DA DO DOMU: ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOME SECOND GENITIVE CASE FORMS IN RUSSIAN

The article based on the material form Russian National Corpus discusses the diachronic development of structures with Russian second genitive case in three types of contexts: 1) with nominal quantifi ers; 2) with the preposition bez ‘without’; 3) with the preposition do ‘towards’. The data obtained from Russian language are compared with the data from other languages (Finnic ones and several Turkic ones), in which there is a tendency to use the partitive case in non-affi rmative clauses. The results of the study show that in all three types of the studied contexts one can observe the partitive semantics of GEN2. In addition, the partitive u-fl exion of GEN2 primarily spreads in the 15th century in deverbal nouns expressing a result or an action itself (constructions like bez razboru ‘without sorting’, bez sprosu ‘without asking’, etc.), as well as in deverbal nouns expressing process or state (constructions like do zvonu ‘before the bell’, do sroku ‘before the term’, etc.). Subsequently, GEN2 in the studied contexts develops diff erently: in all combinations, except for nouns with a defective paradigm, the forms of the regular genitive in -a gradually replace those of GEN2, but for diminutives, including those formed from borrowings, in constructions with nominal quantifi ers, the GEN2-pattern is still in use. In addition, the distribution of the standard genitive and of the GEN2-forms in conditional mood with the particle by suggests a tendency to use GEN2 in Russian nonassertive contexts, which is common in a number of diff erent languages.