Impersonal constructions with the accusative case in Lithuanian and Slavic (A Reply to Axel Holvoet)

Ukrainian in the Language Map of Central Europe: Questions of Areal-Typological Profiling

“…This is why these languages lack other than finite predicates, including the indeclinable forms in -no/-to as found in Polish, some Northern and Northwestern Russian dialects, and Ukrainian (Danylenko, 2005b(Danylenko, , 2006, and in some Lithuanian dialects where these forms are used either with the nominative or accusative direct object (cf. Danylenko, 2005c). The following example illustrates a Polish-Ukrainian isogloss of the impersonal construction with the accusative (or genitive) direct object and the form in -no/-to in the predicate:…”

The so-called possessive perfect in North Russian and the Circum-Baltic area. A diachronic and areal account

“…personal (19) and its impersonal null subject counterpart in (20) Now, the impersonal perfect of an intransitive verb, as in (21a), functions in the same way: This structural parallelism between the impersonal perfect construction in (21b) and the active impersonal null subject construction in (21a) along with the same functional semantics provided a link for the reanalysis of the impersonal perfect toward active. Thus, the Old Lithuanian translations render the Polish -t-/-n-impersonal with either an impersonal -t-perfect or, more commonly, with the null subject construction (Danylenko, 2005b;Matthews, 1955:359). Remarkably, while the Old Lithuanian construction still had the perfect or even resultative meaning, the Polish construction had already developed into a past reference, which is the reason why the Polish -no/-to-construction was often replaced by the preterit in Lithuanian.…”

“…Though it is important to stress that the acquisition of accusative is found in all CB branches, as one finds accusative case marking in East Slavic (Old and Modern Ukrainian and Belarusian [Lopatina, 2000:139], sporadically in North Russian varieties [Matveenko, 1960:352]), West Slavic (Polish), Baltic (Lithuanian East High varieties), and there is also accusative case marking of the core argument with personal pronouns in Fennic languages. The accusative object marking is first attested in the Russian texts from the 16th to 17th century (Borkovskij and Kuznecov, 1963:398-399;Filin, 1972;Jung, 2007:149;Lopatina, 2000:139;Sprinčak, 1960: Several scholars believe that the accusative case-marking constitutes a morphological copying from Polish into Ukrainian, Belarusian (inter alia, Moser, 1998:340, Shevelov, 1969 in press-a) and into some Eastern Lithuanian vernaculars (Danylenko, 2005b). However, a case assignment pattern can hardly be borrowed without the underlying syntactic structure.…”

“…Thus, Polish, Ukrainian and Belarusian very early attest it (cf., inter alia, Danylenko, 2006;Filin, 1972:490;Shevelov, 1968Shevelov, , 1969, whereas it is not attested in Old Lithuanian (cf. Danylenko, 2005b To sum up: the nominative case marking of the object is abandoned and replaced by the accusative case at this relativechronological stage in Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, in some East High Lithuanian varieties and in some North-western Russian varieties. On the other hand, Standard Russian, which did have non-agreeing nominative objects in their earlier stages, and Latvian have accommodated the construction to the parallel and cognate -n-/-t-passive construction (cf.…”

“…Generally, the very last stage D.3 of (i) might have occurred independently in Polish, Belarusian and Eastern Lithuanian (Danylenko, 2005b) on the one hand, and NR varieties, on the other hand (cf. Matveenko, 1961;Shevelov, 1969) triggered by an independent drift along the areally induced cline (i).…”