About the history of indefinite pronouns: quasi-relative constructions with ni budi and ni jest’ in 17th–18th century Russian language

Abstract

The article deals with quasi-relative constructions with ni budi/ ni jest’, which were competing in 17th‒18th century Russian language and claiming the role of an unspecific indefinite marker. This competition resulted in the victory of the ni budi-construction and grammaticalization of the formant nibud’ in modern Russian. The research was carried out on data taken from the historical module of the Russian National Corpus, as well as from a subcorpus of 18th century texts within the main corpus. Quasi-relative constructions are compared according to the following parameters: frequency, semantic distribution, degree of phraseologization and stylistic features. In the 17th century texts, both constructions show low frequency and occur in a limited range of sources: mainly in documents, as well as in some chronicles and everyday communication. In this period, the grammaticalization process was not complete for both constructions. In 18th century texts, the frequency of quasi-relative constructions with ni budi, unlike ni jest’, sharply increases. Constructions with ni budi (nibud’) penetrate into various functional domains of literary language, including church literature. Constructions with ni jest’, on the contrary, were preserved in the 18th century language only as marginal archaisms. The semantics of quasi-relative constructions with ni budi in the period in question differed from nibud’ pronouns in modern Russian. The latter significantly narrowed their semantic scope, having lost the ability to be used as free-choice markers.