Imke Mendoza (editor) - Diachronic Slavonic Syntax: Traces of Latin, Greek and Church Slavonic in Slavonic Syntax

Corpus linguistics and computational approaches to language constitute an important trend in todays linguistics, and Slavic historical linguistics is no exception. This chapter serves as an empirical touchstone for the entire volume. Using parallel Greek and Old Church Slavonic data from the PROIEL/TOROT treebanks, the first attested state of the phenomena covered in the volume is explored, including their relationship to the Greek sources. The chapter covers accusatives with infinitives (Gavrancic this volume, Tomelleri this volume), absolute constructions (). The chapter presents corpus statistics on each of the phenomena, and a brief discussion of the possibility of influence from Greek. The chapters that provide their own studies of Old Church Slavonic data (Fuchsbauer this volume on mock articles, Pichkhadze this volume on syntactic blocking and imic this volume on negative concord), are not replicated, but brought into the discussion when relevant.

This volume covers a wide range of Slavonic contact phenomena in syntax, the majority of them taking place in relatively well-documented historical times. Yet the very first attestation of Slavonic, Old Church Slavonic (OCS), is almost entirely found in translations from Koin and Byzantine Greek, and its syntax seems almost inextricable from the syntax of its Greek source texts. Old Church Slavonic, which we can obviously know only as a written language, was devised as a literary language precisely for the purpose of translating overwhelmingly Greek Biblical, liturgical and other religious sources such as lives of saints. Its subsequent influence on later varieties of Slavonic, especially those linked to the Orthodox church, can hardly be overestimated.

My aim will be to assess the state of the relevant phenomenon in the Marianus dataset. Does it exist at all, and if so, how Slavonic does it seem to be? I will look carefully at the sources of a potential Greek loan, and make a survey of how the OCS translation deals with each of these structures. This immediately raises the difficult and much discussed issue of how to distinguish between contact-induced and internally motivated change. Can a linguistic rule or syntactic pattern be borrowed at all, and how can we determine that it has? Thomason (2006: 674) suggests that an indisputable example of rule borrowing must involve no lexical transfer, and should result in an identical rule in the source language and in the receiving language, which is also completely new to the receiving language. We are quite rarely in this position with OCS, since it is hard to conclusively prove that any rule was completely absent in Slavonic before the hugely influential translations from Greek in the OCS text canon.

Three of the articles in this volume include their own studies of OCS data: Fuchsbauers article The article-like usage of the relative pronoun ie as an indicator of early Slavonic grammatical thinking, Pichkhadzes Blocking of syntactic constructions without Greek counterparts in Church Slavonic, and imics Non-strict negative concord proper and languages in contact: translating Latin and Old Greek into Church Slavonic. For obvious reasons I have not tried to replicate their studies, but I will refer to them when their work proves relevant to the other topics. Tomelleris article raises a wide range of syntactic issues. I will look at only one of them in depth (the use of productive deverbal nouns), but will refer to his article elsewhere when relevant.

As the title suggests, this chapter is intended as a sampler, not as a set of fully worked-out studies of the phenomena in question. The statistical analyses are sometimes quite simple, often due to a scarcity of data, and I do not pretend to supply a full literature survey for each topic; I cite researchers whose ideas I would like to acknowledge, often just a few representatives from a much larger body of literature.

The accusative with infinitive (AcI) is a rarity in OCS, but relatively frequent in Greek. Gavrancics study of the Croatian AcI in this volume naturally takes Latin as the point of comparison, since Croatia belonged to the West church and translated its religious texts primarily from Latin, albeit with traces of the Cyrillo-Methodian translations in the Old Croatian sources. In Tomelleris article we can see that this type of influence can be found in 16th century Russian Church Slavonic translations from Latin as well. As Gavrancic points out, the AcI was used less in the Vulgate than in Classical Latin, but it is still fairly well attested, and not much less used than in the Greek New Testament, which must be the point of departure for any study of the OCS AcI.