2018 # 6 (32)
Ulitova A.S.
Fedor Buslaev’s Views of the Word Order in the Attirbutive Phrase and Its Development in the Modern Linguistic
Abstract
Many notifications on the World Order, which F. Buslaev has made in ‘’The Historical Grammar of Russian Language’’, were confirmed in later investigations. Particularly, the scientist discovered some dependences in the word order of an attributive phrase: the attribute with more constant meaning will be placed closer to a noun than another attribute; adjectives and pronouns behave themselves principally differently (for example, the pronouns’ placement is more free than the adjective’s); even in the earliest Old Russian texts the attribute’s position could be stylistically meaningful. Afterwards, the linguists (not arguing with F. Buslaev, but precising his point of view) came to the conclusion, that it is very important to explore the dialect’s data, because some peculiarities, that vanished from the Standard Russian language, are still remaining there. For example, we can see there the connection between the attribute’s position and the defined noun’s animacy. This dependency was found in the Novgorod birchbark letters by D. Worth, later it was found in the business letters of the 17th century, and finally, it might be still existing in modern southern and north-western dialects, where the possessive pronoun tend to be postpositive with the animated noun.
Key words
word order, Old Russian syntax, noun’s animacy