Patroeva, N. V. ARCHAIC FORMS OF THE LINKING VERB TO BE IN THE POETIC SPEECH OF THE XVIII CENTURY: GRAMMATICAL AND STYLISTIC CHARACTERISTICS. Proceedings of Petrozavodsk State University. 2022;44(7):71–78. DOI: 10.15393/uchz.art.2022.819


To the 130th anniversary of the birth of M. I. Pigin


ARCHAIC FORMS OF THE LINKING VERB TO BE IN THE POETIC SPEECH OF THE XVIII CENTURY: GRAMMATICAL AND STYLISTIC CHARACTERISTICS

Patroeva
N. V.
Petrozavodsk State University
Keywords:
poetic syntax
linking verb
verb to be
poetic grammar
M. I. Pigin
Summary: The paper uses M. I. Pigin’s linguistic works to investigate the intermediate position of the syncretic con- structions with the verb to be in the eighteenth-century poetic texts. The author analyzes the gradual loss of abstract cop- ulas and existential verbs in different genres. The obtained data are compared with the materials of the eighteenth-centu- ry grammatical treatises and the twentieth-century works on the history of Russian syntax. Based on the texts from the Russian National Corpus, the archaic forms есмь (esm’), еси (esi) and есте (este) are studied and the frequency of their corresponding forms in poetic texts is analyzed. The analysis of the Baroque and Classicism poetic contexts, as well as the data of the The Syntactic Dictionary of Russian Poetry of the XVIII Century confirms the tendencies associated with the reduced usage of these forms. The author points to the actualization of linking verbs in the present tense in so-called “high” genres, the use of copulas for the purpose of folklore stylization, and a general tendency to reduce the number of the archaic connective forms in the Pushkin era.




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