Inchoative verbs in constructions with infinitives in 16th‒17th century Russian sources: Searching for the difference

Abstract

The article focuses on the study of differences between phase verbs in constructions with infinitive clause in the 16th‒17th century Russian writing. The verbs under discussion are: načati, počati, jati, učati, and stati, as well as the verb byti, which does not belong to phase ones, but competes with them in the simple future tense form. The study is limited to the constructions with auxiliary verbs in the perfective present tense form, i. e., those that refer to the future. The data was collected from the Middle Russian subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus. Contexts from the corpus are classified according to the following parameters: auxiliariness, infinitive, agency/non-agency and telicity/atelicity/punctivity of the predicate in the infinitive form, aspectual semantics of the construction (phasal, iterative, habitual, general factual, durative-continuative meanings), the type of the clause in question, the date and the title of the source, its register and genre. It was found that each periphrastic construction has a unique set of properties associated with the paradigmatic limitations of the auxiliary verb, tendency to occur in a certain clause type, register and genre. The constructions are sensitive to various semantic features of infinitive and aspectual semantics of the context. It is argued that constructions with the verb učnu are less associated with the expression of inchoativity since they are attested in the contexts uncommon for inchoative verbs. Two distinct clusters of periphrastic constructions are distinguished: older constructions with the verbs načnu, počnu and imu and newer ones with the verbs učnu, stanu and budu.