Development of the anaphoric object: Old church Slavonic in the Indo-European perspective

• Main Author: Grković Mejdžor Jasmina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute for the Serbian Language, Belgrade 2006-01-01
• Series: Južnoslovenski Filolog
• Online Access: http://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/0350-185X/2006/0350-185X0662039G.pdf

The comparison of various ancient Indo-European languages shows that Proto-Indo-European did not have an anaphoric object in cases of coordination, conjunct participles and in question-answer constructions. Its absence is in accordance with the active type of early Proto-Indo-European in which there was no category of syntactic transitivity, verbs had an absolute meaning and the accusative was an adverbial case for rendering the circumstances in which the action took place. So if two actions occur under the same circumstance, it is rendered only once. The appearance of the anaphoric object is concomitant with the development of syntactic transitivity. The change of language type (active > nominative/accusative) encompasses the loss of absolute verbs and the perception of an action as "directed" toward an object. This led to the cognitively induced need to mark an atypical, animate patient (>object). After this, the analogy led to the spread of the anaphoric object into contexts with an inanimate antecedent. Old Church Slavonic texts show the late Proto-Slavic situation, in which the development of the anaphoric object was on its way. The analysis here indicates that two parameters were important in its spread: animacy of the antecedent and the degree of syntactic cohesion of two predications: the spread of the anaphoric object was faster if the antecedent was animate as well as in coordinated structures, and slower if the antecedent was inanimate or within constructions with conjunct participles.