WELL-FORGOTTEN WORDS IN PRESENT-DAY COLLOQUIAL SPEECH: THE CASE OF IBO AND DABY

The article deals with the diachronic description of two archaic Russian conjunctions, which in diff erent historical periods have reacquired popularity. The causative conjunction ibo is an early borrowing from Old Church Slavonic; the purpose conjunction daby emerged in Middle Russian under Church Slavonic infl uence. The former began to become obsolete already at the beginning of the 18th century, outstripping even the synonymous word poné zhe, while daby acquired an archaic fl avour towards the end of the same century. The accentological evolution of these words is also associated with decreased frequency: the original accent ibó disappeared quickly, while the variant dabý remained for quite a long time and slowly gave way to the innovative dá by. 
Nevertheless, in the 19th century, these words did not completely disappear from usage but became a feature of the elevated language. Dictionaries of the 20th century label them as obsolete, sometimes bookish. The data of the main subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus (RNC) generally confi rm these indications: since the mid-19th century, both conjunctions have been in low use. 
It turns out, however, that these words are quite regularly used in modern colloquial speech: their frequency is signifi cantly high in the newspaper and oral subcorpora of the RNC and especially in the General Internet Corpus of Russian (GICR), the collection of Russian texts from the Internet. Moreover, the words daby and ibo are also used in vulgar speech: there are even obscene phraseological expressions with them. The article attempts to describe this non-trivial stylistic shift.