Old Church Slavonic – Morphosyntactic structures, Part 1
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Andersen, Henning
Introduction to the morphosyntax of nouns in Old Church Slavonic.
 Hi, I'm Henny Andersen and in this part of our presentation we will look at some of the significant features of OCS morpho syntax. This is a huge topic in and of itself and it's particularly complicated in OCS where almost all the texts are translated from the Guic and have been copied and recopied by scribes who most likely were conversant with Guic. In order not to get bogged down in details of OCS attestation, we will stay on the surface and limit ourselves to a relatively small number of topics within this large area. We will begin with nominal structures or noun phrases as some people call them and here you have an overview of the sub topics we'll cover linearization or word order, gender, number, case, referentiality with the subtitles of definiteness and partitivity and then we'll go on to possession at the end. One note on the examples to be shown. They are all in transliteration. Word forms that are abbreviated in the manuscript cited are written in full but marked with an initial superscript zero. The fact that citations are in transliteration means that they reflect the graphic conventions of the glycolytic and Cyrillic alphabets. They may not be phonemic and they may contain misspellings. In a few places I have resolved a transliterated ending in what one could call a late common Slavic phonemic transcription just to make it clearer. I'll draw your attention to these deviations from the strict transliteration the first few times they occur. Our first topic then is noun phrases and first of all OCS noun phrases are linearized or serialized according to their information structure. As a consequence determiners can both proceed and follow their nouns as you see in the examples under ND and DN, TROVECTE and FSIAKGRACH and adjectives can both proceed and follow their nouns they modify. All depends on how much information they add to a given situation. The one exception to this obvious free linearization is quantifier phrases where there is a really predominant order namely numerator before denominator or if you wish number word before the referring noun. Surely this has something to do with the fact that quantifiers and referring nouns provide complementary information about a given reference. The noun phrase describes the noun in the describes the reference the quantifier tells us how many of it there are and these are pieces of information that have equal weights and so it's natural to have a fixed order. Some quantifiers are morphologically adjectives and agree with the referring noun other quantifiers are nouns and govern the referring noun in the genitive but this grammatical difference has no effect on the fixed word order. The most salient grammatical features of noun phrases are gender, number and case. We begin with gender. It's important in OCS as in many other languages to distinguish between lexical and referential gender. Gender is primarily a grammatical feature of nominals but in some instances morphological gender is dictated by the referent. See the first example here where we have this noun phrase Uchenik Togo a disciple of that man or this person where Togo merely means genitive singular masculine and the fact that it refers to a male person that has that referential value is an implicature. An interesting feature of OCS nominal morphology is the widespread existence of alimorphs reflecting the gender of noun stems. Some of this has already been covered in the sections on morphology but here are a few more examples to clarify what we are dealing with. In examples two, three and four on this and the next slide you can see some examples of this. In 2a note the different endings for neuter and masculine nouns which are highlighted with red and of personal and non-personal nouns in examples b and c, 2b and 2c. They both show the personal gender which is developing category and in OCS with a fair amount of variation. The personal feature is most consistently marked with nouns denoting free mature healthy males. Slaves young persons and the handicapped may not be marked for personal but eventually this marking is extended and becomes the feature of animacy known from the modern Slavic languages. In examples three and four you see some examples of masculine and feminine alimorphy in the adeclension and in the edeclension. In the edeclension this instrumental singular has different endings for masculine and feminine nouns and different endings in the nominative plural as well. When nouns of different gender are coordinated gender agreement is dictated by the noun that is closest to the agreeing adjective as an example five. Here you can see the word for bad being in the dative plural agreeing with the word for cook which is also in the dative plural and the word for bad is masculine just like the word for cook which is so cacier. But in example six you see that the declension class of sluga which is an a declension noun although it is masculine is ignored in agreement. The word mojain agrees with the declension class of its head noun which is a little peculiar but that occurs in old Czechoslovakia with asked them nouns that denote personal nouns. In examples seven you have a case of gender resolution two words of different gender with the same modifier and the modifier agrees with the word sin here rather than blasphemy. Our next category is the category of number. Number is an obligatory category in OCS and the distinctions between singular, dual and plural are quite rigorously maintained. Still there are instances of lexical variation. Example one and example two shows that when you refer to several people you can speak of their hearts or hearts and similarly of their hands as dual or plural. On the next slide in example three you see that agreement in number is with the nearest numbered constituent. This is a sort of tricky example where the verb is a passive with the present tense of the auxiliary verb and a past passive participle. And as you can see here the auxiliary verb agrees in dual with the word two and the participle agrees in plural number with the word three because in Slavic the word for two is dual and the word for three is plural. And in addition to this fairly strict agreement rule there are some additional things to be said about number. First of all there are some words that are only in the plural and they're called Pluralea tantum such as the ones given here firewood, foam, saliva and people. There are some words that although they denote things that are composed of two elements are plural such as the word for gate or lips or bosom. And on the next slide example six shows the existence of collective nouns that refer to groups of people. So the word for brother has a plural but normally when you're talking about kinship brotherhood you will use the collective brachia which is used here. And you can see in example seven that although brachia is a collective feminine noun it will have agreement in the plural. Brachia it is agreed with by the word for all but the verb and the participle are in the plural. Finally as example eight shows there are nouns that are plural and for which you have to derive a single singular singleative noun if you wish to refer to an individual. So ljud means the folk but an individual man of the people is a ljudjinn and if you have two of them you'll define you'll derive the dual word from the singular getting ljudjinn as shown here. Our third noun category is case. OCS has six cases, nounative, accusative, and dative are the ones that express the central syntactic functions of subject, direct object, and indirect object. But all the cases except for the nominative additionally serve a variety of adverbial functions both governed by ad positions and on their own. Only the genitive plays special roles as both subject and direct object case as we shall see in a little while. There's one interesting corner of OCS grammar that involves gender, number, and case namely numeral syntax. Here you can see that the numeral two, three, and four have different agreement. Numeral two, deva, is a dual. Numeral three, thria, is a plural and so is four. In example three you have the word for five which is a singular noun that combines with a genitive plural just as all other cardinal numeral except two, three, and four. These peculiarities play out in an interesting way in phrasal numerance such as the words for the teens and the decades as you can see in example one, two, and three. Note how the referring noun grade city is in the dual with numeral twelve but in the plural with numeral thirteen and how numeral ten is in the dual in twenty and the plural in thirty but in the genitive plural in fifty. In addition to these slightly odd details numeral phrase syntax also shows differences in gender agreement. In example four you can see the word other agreeing with the numeral five which is the feminine noun whereas example five which is almost similar the word for other agrees with the referring noun. Of course there is the slight difference between the two words for other and that is the difference that explains why we have different agreement. Before we let go of the syntax of number words in OCS let me show you a couple of examples in which a nominal agrees not with the singular number of the numeral but with its reference value. The phrase ten men as the word men in the genitive plural deviant is a masculine noun. The word the opposition though the Christians imprisoned are in the accusative plural just like the word deviant so we have a masculine singular deviant and the agreement of the opposition is in the plural instead of the singular. It is agreement with the referential value of the numeral and something similar is the case in example seven where we talk about eight days going by and one of the two of the texts have is per nie sound the verb is in the singular because ocean for the word for eight is singular but in another text we have the word is per nie sound which is an heiress plural because the word for eight after all has the referential value of plurality. Our next topic is one that we've touched on several times as namely the notion of reference but here we'll be talking about two important grammatical categories of referentiality. The first of this is definiteness. In OCS there are no definite or indefinite articles but adjectives have two declensions one definite the other indefinite. In example one here you can see the word blind in the indefinite when the text first introduces the blind man into discourse and you can see the same person referred to as a definite blind person when the text refers back to him as an already known entity. In some syntactic environments the distinction between definite and indefinite is neutralized. On one hand we have a fair amount of set phrases that are indefinite as from the first and the word for Easter Sunday and the word for Ash Wednesday they have adjectives that are indefinite. On the other hand when participle signs are in opposition they are typically definite as here Biff-Chonin agreeing with Caramolon the riot having occurred in the city. When adjectives are coordinated some of the oldest texts mark definite only in the first of the two adjectives here bad and good the word for bad is definite and the word for good is indefinite but it is understood that the definiteness marked on the first adjective is for the whole adjectival phrase. The same sort of example is in number five those who hear my words and do them where those who hear is definite and you cannot see any definiteness in the verb to do. We can see this as evidence of an earlier stage of the language in which definite markers were not special adjective endings but were phrase and critics that could have an entire noun phrase in their scope. Since some of the numerals are adjectives we are not surprised to see that they can have definite word forms such as in the examples six seven and eight. In six you see that the word for both functions as the definite of the word for two. In example seven you see that to make a definite form of the word for eleven you have to make the word for one definite but example eight shows the numeral ten marked as definite here it is and I have resolved that into its composition the t and the ending for the definite article attached to it. So I think although one can make a semiological resolution of this word it has to be taken as an example of a noun that is definite even in a language that has no definite nouns. It makes us wonder if it is a noun for ten that is marked for definiteness or perhaps its reference the ten. Slide 20 begins the second topic we will look at under the heading of referentiality and that is partitivity. Examples one and two have direct objects expressed by the partitive genitive except of the except the instead of the accusative to taste wine would normally be in the accusative but here you have it in the genitive because you taste only part of the wine and similarly with the eternal life that you may have you would expect the eternal life not to be in the partitive but rather in the in the regular accusative but the way they looked at it was that the part of the eternal life would still be something partitive. Subjects of negated verbs of existence or presence show that the partitive genitive was extended also to negations and here you have an example Jesus was not there and the word for Jesus is in the genitive nor was his disciples there and the word for disciple is also in the genitive genitive plural. The sentence in example four may no light shine has the word for light as a subject but it is in the genitive because the verb is negated. Negated direct objects are very common in this language. Here you have one about a woman who's lost a coin and the question the rhetorical question is asked will she not light a lamp and sweep out the house. So here you have the lamp in the genitive and sweep out the house will be in the genitive because they are direct objects of negated verbs. Even negated adverbials may be in the genitive. A topic that is often associated with the genitive case is possession. With personal nouns OCS expresses possession primarily by means of possessive adjectives derived from the given noun. Several suffixes are used with singular nouns and they're exemplified here in one, two and three. And so these possessive adjectives stand in for genitives from our point of view. When you have a plural possessor however you use a different suffix which you have exemplified here. The Jews servants are the I can't say Jewish but it has the special suffix which is well known from Ruski which are the people who are owned by the Russians. When you have coordinated possessors only the first can be expressed by possessive adjectives. The second one will be in the genitive. So here Mary is the possessor with the suffix in but Martha has a genitive suffix E. Another way to express possession particularly with non-personal nouns is the dative. Here in example six, doers of injustice and seven, a house of prayer and you can then wonder if it's English or Old Church Slavonic that is odd by using different kinds of expression for this. Also with personal nouns the dative occurs. In example three you have the word for the Jageseans in the dative plural in one of the texts but another text has a variant that we would expect namely the possessive adjective derived from plural. This is all the time we have for the few topics we had to cover today. There will be more coming up on ad-positional structures and clauses and clause combining in subsequent lectures. Thank you for watching today and hope you come back. Khwaleem way.
 Hi, I'm Henny Andersen and in this part of our presentation we will look at some of the  significant features of OCS morpho syntax. This is a huge topic in and of itself and  it's particularly complicated in OCS where almost all the texts are translated from the  Guic and have been copied and recopied by scribes who most likely were conversant with  Guic. In order not to get bogged down in details of OCS attestation, we will stay on the surface  and limit ourselves to a relatively small number of topics within this large area. We will begin  with nominal structures or noun phrases as some people call them and here you have an overview  of the sub topics we'll cover linearization or word order, gender, number, case, referentiality  with the subtitles of definiteness and partitivity and then we'll go on to possession at the end.  One note on the examples to be shown. They are all in transliteration. Word forms that are  abbreviated in the manuscript cited are written in full but marked with an initial superscript zero.  The fact that citations are in transliteration means that they reflect the graphic conventions  of the glycolytic and Cyrillic alphabets. They may not be phonemic and they may contain  misspellings. In a few places I have resolved a transliterated ending in what one could call  a late common Slavic phonemic transcription just to make it clearer. I'll draw your attention to  these deviations from the strict transliteration the first few times they occur. Our first topic  then is noun phrases and first of all OCS noun phrases are linearized or serialized according  to their information structure. As a consequence determiners can both proceed and follow their  nouns as you see in the examples under ND and DN, TROVECTE and FSIAKGRACH and adjectives can both  proceed and follow their nouns they modify. All depends on how much information they add to a  given situation. The one exception to this obvious free linearization is quantifier phrases where  there is a really predominant order namely numerator before denominator or if you wish  number word before the referring noun. Surely this has something to do with the fact that  quantifiers and referring nouns provide complementary information about a given reference. The noun  phrase describes the noun in the describes the reference the quantifier tells us how many of it  there are and these are pieces of information that have equal weights and so it's natural to have a  fixed order. Some quantifiers are morphologically adjectives and agree with the referring noun  other quantifiers are nouns and govern the referring noun in the genitive but this grammatical  difference has no effect on the fixed word order. The most salient grammatical features of noun  phrases are gender, number and case. We begin with gender. It's important in OCS as in many other  languages to distinguish between lexical and referential gender. Gender is primarily a grammatical  feature of nominals but in some instances morphological gender is dictated by the referent.  See the first example here where we have this noun phrase Uchenik Togo a disciple of that man or  this person where Togo merely means genitive singular masculine and the fact that it refers to a  male person that has that referential value is an implicature. An interesting feature of OCS  nominal morphology is the widespread existence of alimorphs reflecting the gender of noun stems.  Some of this has already been covered in the sections on morphology but here are a few more  examples to clarify what we are dealing with. In examples two, three and four on this and the  next slide you can see some examples of this. In 2a note the different endings for neuter and  masculine nouns which are highlighted with red and of personal and non-personal nouns in examples  b and c, 2b and 2c. They both show the personal gender which is developing category and in OCS  with a fair amount of variation. The personal feature is most consistently marked with nouns  denoting free mature healthy males. Slaves young persons and the handicapped may not be marked  for personal but eventually this marking is extended and becomes the feature of animacy  known from the modern Slavic languages. In examples three and four you see some examples of masculine  and feminine alimorphy in the adeclension and in the edeclension. In the edeclension this  instrumental singular has different endings for masculine and feminine nouns and different  endings in the nominative plural as well. When nouns of different gender are coordinated gender  agreement is dictated by the noun that is closest to the agreeing adjective as an example five.  Here you can see the word for bad being in the dative plural agreeing with the word for cook  which is also in the dative plural and the word for bad is masculine just like the word for cook  which is so cacier. But in example six you see that the declension class of sluga which is an  a declension noun although it is masculine is ignored in agreement. The word mojain agrees with  the declension class of its head noun which is a little peculiar but that occurs in old  Czechoslovakia with asked them nouns that denote personal nouns. In examples seven you have a case  of gender resolution two words of different gender with the same modifier and the modifier agrees  with the word sin here rather than blasphemy. Our next category is the category of number.  Number is an obligatory category in OCS and the distinctions between singular, dual and plural  are quite rigorously maintained. Still there are instances of lexical variation. Example one  and example two shows that when you refer to several people you can speak of their hearts or hearts  and similarly of their hands as dual or plural. On the next slide in example three you see that  agreement in number is with the nearest numbered constituent. This is a sort of tricky example  where the verb is a passive with the present tense of the auxiliary verb and a past passive  participle. And as you can see here the auxiliary verb agrees in dual with the word two and the  participle agrees in plural number with the word three because in Slavic the word for two is dual  and the word for three is plural. And in addition to this fairly strict agreement rule there are  some additional things to be said about number. First of all there are some words that are only  in the plural and they're called Pluralea tantum such as the ones given here firewood,  foam, saliva and people. There are some words that although they denote things that are composed  of two elements are plural such as the word for gate or lips or bosom. And on the next slide  example six shows the existence of collective nouns that refer to groups of people. So the word  for brother has a plural but normally when you're talking about kinship brotherhood you will use  the collective brachia which is used here. And you can see in example seven that although brachia  is a collective feminine noun it will have agreement in the plural. Brachia it is agreed with by the  word for all but the verb and the participle are in the plural. Finally as example eight shows there  are nouns that are plural and for which you have to derive a single singular singleative noun if  you wish to refer to an individual. So ljud means the folk but an individual man of the people is  a ljudjinn and if you have two of them you'll define you'll derive the dual word from the singular  getting ljudjinn as shown here. Our third noun category is case. OCS has six cases,  nounative, accusative, and dative are the ones that express the central syntactic functions of  subject, direct object, and indirect object. But all the cases except for the nominative  additionally serve a variety of adverbial functions both governed by ad positions and on  their own. Only the genitive plays special roles as both subject and direct object case as we shall  see in a little while. There's one interesting corner of OCS grammar that involves gender,  number, and case namely numeral syntax. Here you can see that the numeral two, three, and four  have different agreement. Numeral two, deva, is a dual. Numeral three, thria, is a plural and so is  four. In example three you have the word for five which is a singular noun that combines with a  genitive plural just as all other cardinal numeral except two, three, and four. These peculiarities  play out in an interesting way in phrasal numerance such as the words for the teens and the decades as  you can see in example one, two, and three. Note how the referring noun grade city is in the dual  with numeral twelve but in the plural with numeral thirteen and how numeral ten is in the dual in  twenty and the plural in thirty but in the genitive plural in fifty. In addition to these slightly odd  details numeral phrase syntax also shows differences in gender agreement. In example four you can see  the word other agreeing with the numeral five which is the feminine noun whereas example five  which is almost similar the word for other agrees with the referring noun. Of course there is the  slight difference between the two words for other and that is the difference that explains why we  have different agreement. Before we let go of the syntax of number words in OCS let me show you a  couple of examples in which a nominal agrees not with the singular number of the numeral but with  its reference value. The phrase ten men as the word men in the genitive plural deviant is a masculine  noun. The word the opposition though the Christians imprisoned are in the accusative plural just like  the word deviant so we have a masculine singular deviant and the agreement of the opposition is  in the plural instead of the singular. It is agreement with the referential value of the numeral  and something similar is the case in example seven where we talk about eight days going by and one  of the two of the texts have is per nie sound the verb is in the singular because ocean for the  word for eight is singular but in another text we have the word is per nie sound which is an heiress  plural because the word for eight after all has the referential value of plurality. Our next topic  is one that we've touched on several times as namely the notion of reference but here we'll be  talking about two important grammatical categories of referentiality. The first of this is definiteness.  In OCS there are no definite or indefinite articles but adjectives have two declensions one definite  the other indefinite. In example one here you can see the word blind in the indefinite when the  text first introduces the blind man into discourse and you can see the same person referred to as  a definite blind person when the text refers back to him as an already known entity. In some  syntactic environments the distinction between definite and indefinite is neutralized. On one  hand we have a fair amount of set phrases that are indefinite as from the first and the word for  Easter Sunday and the word for Ash Wednesday they have adjectives that are indefinite. On the other  hand when participle signs are in opposition they are typically definite as here Biff-Chonin  agreeing with Caramolon the riot having occurred in the city. When adjectives are coordinated some  of the oldest texts mark definite only in the first of the two adjectives here bad and good  the word for bad is definite and the word for good is indefinite but it is understood that the  definiteness marked on the first adjective is for the whole adjectival phrase. The same sort  of example is in number five those who hear my words and do them where those who hear is definite  and you cannot see any definiteness in the verb to do. We can see this as evidence of an earlier  stage of the language in which definite markers were not special adjective endings but were  phrase and critics that could have an entire noun phrase in their scope. Since some of the  numerals are adjectives we are not surprised to see that they can have definite word forms such  as in the examples six seven and eight. In six you see that the word for both functions as the  definite of the word for two. In example seven you see that to make a definite form of the word  for eleven you have to make the word for one definite but example eight shows the numeral ten  marked as definite here it is and I have resolved that into its composition the t and the ending  for the definite article attached to it. So I think although one can make a semiological  resolution of this word it has to be taken as an example of a noun that is definite even in a  language that has no definite nouns. It makes us wonder if it is a noun for ten that is marked  for definiteness or perhaps its reference the ten. Slide 20 begins the second topic we will look  at under the heading of referentiality and that is partitivity. Examples one and two have direct  objects expressed by the partitive genitive except of the except the instead of the accusative to  taste wine would normally be in the accusative but here you have it in the genitive because you taste  only part of the wine and similarly with the eternal life that you may have you would expect the  eternal life not to be in the partitive but rather in the in the regular accusative but the way they  looked at it was that the part of the eternal life would still be something partitive. Subjects  of negated verbs of existence or presence show that the partitive genitive was extended also to  negations and here you have an example Jesus was not there and the word for Jesus is in the genitive  nor was his disciples there and the word for disciple is also in the genitive genitive plural.  The sentence in example four may no light shine has the word for light as a subject but it is in  the genitive because the verb is negated. Negated direct objects are very common in this language.  Here you have one about a woman who's lost a coin and the question the rhetorical question is asked  will she not light a lamp and sweep out the house. So here you have the lamp in the genitive and  sweep out the house will be in the genitive because they are direct objects of negated verbs.  Even negated adverbials may be in the genitive. A topic that is often associated with the  genitive case is possession. With personal nouns OCS expresses possession primarily by means of  possessive adjectives derived from the given noun. Several suffixes are used with singular nouns  and they're exemplified here in one, two and three. And so these possessive adjectives stand in for  genitives from our point of view. When you have a plural possessor however you use a different  suffix which you have exemplified here. The Jews servants are the I can't say Jewish but it has  the special suffix which is well known from Ruski which are the people who are owned by the  Russians. When you have coordinated possessors only the first can be expressed by possessive  adjectives. The second one will be in the genitive. So here Mary is the possessor with the suffix  in but Martha has a genitive suffix E. Another way to express possession particularly with non-personal  nouns is the dative. Here in example six, doers of injustice and seven, a house of prayer and you  can then wonder if it's English or Old Church Slavonic that is odd by using different kinds of  expression for this. Also with personal nouns the dative occurs. In example three you have the  word for the Jageseans in the dative plural in one of the texts but another text has a variant  that we would expect namely the possessive adjective derived from plural. This is all the  time we have for the few topics we had to cover today. There will be more coming up on ad-positional  structures and clauses and clause combining in subsequent lectures. Thank you for watching  today and hope you come back. Khwaleem way.
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