| Summary: | This article deals with the transformation of the Indo-European possessive construction Nom (possessum) + *jestb + Dat (possessor) in Slavic. This construction is attested in Old Church Slavonic and Old Serbian, together with a new type of possessive predication with the verb "have". It also exists in Old Russian, where a new structure with i + Gen was introduced early on. In the later development of Slavic languages it disappears or becomes obsolete, with the reanalysis of the dative into a possessive adnominal. If a noun denoting physical or emotional state was possessum, it was reanalyzed in Slavic languages as a predicative of a new impersonal construction where the dative denotes an experiencer. If this possessive construction had an infinitive complement, it was reanalyzed as a modal construction *jestb + [Dat + Inf]. So, Dat + Inf occupies the subject position and the dative becomes the logical subject of the infinitive action. This process started in the period of Old Church Slavonic and was completed by the time the first Slavic vernacular documents appeared. This analysis shows that one of the important reasons for syntactic change is the change of a language type, in this case, the change of the esse- to the habeo-type. Archaic esse-structures became incompatible with the dominant nominative language type, so they either disappeared or changed into modal or impersonal structures.
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