Typological features of the category of person in Russian grammar. Expansion into syntax, maximum activity of subjectless sentences in Slavia, variety of unreal modalities

Abstract

The restructuring in the system of verb tenses, which took place in the separate history of the Slavic languages, led in a number of languages to the loss of grammatical person indicators s in some predicative models and to the activation of impersonal and subjectless sentences. If in the Proto-Slavic and Old Russian languages in all forms of the past tenses the meaning of the person was present, then in the Russian language, in place of the four past tenses, one perfect was preserved, in which the link present time from the verb *byti, which explicitly expressed the meaning of the person, was gradually lost. The linguistic consciousness of the speakers got used to the indistinctness of the grammatical person, which led to the emergence of structurally diverse and widely used non-subjective sentences. According to the repertoire of models of subjectless sentences, the Slavic languages are close to each other, but differ in the activity of the models. The occurrence of infinitive and mononuclear sentences with a verbal predicate in the 2nd person singular increases in the direction from Slovenian to Polish and further to Russian. In the aspect of areal-diachronic differences between the Slavic languages, the considered facts show that in the direction from west to east (from Slovene to Polish and further to Russian) there is a typological tendency to weaken the inflectional nature of the grammatical category of a person and to blur the basic meanings of a person.