SIMPLE FORMS OF ADJECTIVES IN THE CHURCH SLAVONIC LANGUAGE: THE CONNECTION WITH PREDICATIVITY, INDEFINITENESS, NON-REFERENTIAL USE

The article describes the peculiarities of the use of simple forms of adjectives in the texts of the Uspensky codex of 12th–13th centuries from the functional grammar and the theory of reference (determination) of the modern Russian language point of view (N. D. Arutunova, A D. Shmelev, S. A. Krylov, V. Gladrov, T. M. Nikolaeva, I. I. Revzin). We try to aspire that the functional-communicative analysis is not only possible in this case, but also fruitful. Based on this approach it is possible to substantiate (with suffi cient degree of consistency) the use of simple forms of adjectives in the ancient text, the meaning of which, in our opinion, has not been studied properly in the scientifi c literature. This causes a return to predicative theory (A. A. Urzhumova) that was already discussed in the mid-twentieth century. The conclusions of the research are based on the analysis of all contexts with simple and pronominal forms of adjectives contained in word-index to the Uspensky codex of 12th–13th centuries. We are dealing with 1235 adjectives which are used almost 9 thousand times: there are about 4 thousand samples of usage of simple forms and about 5 thousand instances with pronominal forms.

The analysis of about 4 thousand uses of simple forms of adjectives in the Uspensky codex showed that they are used as predicates and the so-called second indirect cases in more than 900 usages. Moreover more than 1500 cases illustrate their usage for expressing the defi niteness in case if it has already been expressed in the adjective by lexical means (neutralization). Thus, it is evident that there are about 1500 samples, the analysis of which allows revealing the contexts where the old forms of distribution still remained in accordance with their ancient meaning. We consider the function of simple forms in the mentioned above contexts as an attributive function. The analysis of these contexts leads to the conclusion that we should not classify all cases of simple adjectives usage in old Church texts only as examples of their predicative use. The so-called “hidden predicativity” contributes to the understanding of the noun group as indefi nite one, but at the same time it is impossible to say that all simple forms of adjectives are predicative. The use of simple forms in the attributive function should be associated with the expression of the category of determination (defi niteness / indefi niteness) and should be explained by the terms of indefi niteness or non-referential use of the determined noun. Pragmatic source of indefi niteness is most often the introduction, which can be carried out with the help of existential statement, as well as by using indefi nite description. We can see that the meaning of the uncertainty is bounded up with modal and aspectual/ temporal characteristics of diff erent types of predicates in the analyzed texts. This connection requires further study in ancient texts.