| In this doctoral thesis I consider the domain of the syntax of the participles in the Kievan chronicle (KC). The goal of the study is twofold. First, it is important to bring to scholarly attention the value of the KC as an empirical source of linguistic investigation. The significance of the KC for the history of the East Slavic languages stems from its length and the degree to which the manuscript reflects the literary norms of what is traditionally called sobstvenno drevnerusskij jazyk ('old Russian language proper'). Nonetheless, the chronicle has remained outside of the attention of scholars; very few studies have been devoted to the linguistic specifics of the KC and all of them deal exclusively with its phonetics. This doctoral thesis represents the first syntactic study of the language of the manuscript.; Second, despite the fact that the system of participles presented in the earliest manuscripts can be considered particularly literary, we will not be able to understand the historical development of the participles without a proper description and understanding of how this system functioned. The research focused on the interaction between syntactic structure and grammatical meaning in the participles. Data from the KC demonstrated that the participles represent a dynamic system rather than static one.; Due to the lack of native speakers as informants, it was necessary for the analysis to privilege the surface structure and word order. A surprising finding of this study is that sometimes certain phenomena, as, for example, the subject knezь 'the prince' in the phrase slysanuъ knezь sie rece 'the prince heard that (and) said' are just what they appear to be on the surface, i.e., knezь is the subject of the participle rather than of the finite verb rece . In addition, in the course of the discussion, I have drawn on valid data from other languages such as the Slavic languages, Tamil, Modern Turkish, and Modern Russian. The conclusions reached in this study unequivocally showed the importance of investigating different patterns and forms within one manuscript rather than exploring a particular issue by surveying a body of texts that stretch over a few centuries. |
