러시아어 동사 시제 체계의 문법화

Abstract

The Russian tense system has undergone substantial changes that are not arbitrary but can be explained in a principled way by taking recourse to some of the linguistic principles in the Naturalness Theory (NT). The development from the Old Church Slavic (OCS) to the recent Russian shows clear grammaticalization processes and this paper attempts to explain the change of the each tense with some principles of NT. According to NT, the inflection of the present in OCS shows quite unnatural paradigms and for this reason, it can be hypothesized to have changed in the direction of achieving more congruence according to the naturalness predictions in the course of historical progression into the later Slavic languages. Proto-Slavic did not have any future form of its own, but the newly-formed Slavic aspectual differentiation brought about synthetic future. Later periphrastic forms of the future were introduced in order to distinguish from the person marker of the present. Among the four different preterite forms only the perfect with the l-participle could survive. In view of the Uniformity Principle of NT, according to which one form is related to one meaning, the situation has improved. Thus, each Russian temporal paradigm shows the same unidirectional progression of phases of grammaticalization and this process can be effectively explained on the basis of the concept of the natural language change as conceived in NT.