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The C system of relatives and complement clauses in the history of Slavic languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Roland Meyer
Roland Meyer*
Affiliation:
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
*
[roland.meyer@hu-berlin.de]
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Abstract

This article scrutinizes the diachrony of relativizers and complement clause subordinators in Russian, Polish, and Czech. Historical morphology indicates a development from agreeing relative pronouns via noninflected relativizers to complement clause subordinators. This concurs with recent findings on Germanic (Axel-Tober 2017), but contradicts more traditional proposals that derive subordinators from demonstratives. The respective syntactic reanalyses are demonstrated on diachronic Slavic corpus data. Moreover, a quantitative comparison of sixteenth- to seventeenth- century East Slavic texts with and without West Slavic interference suggests that the use of kotoryj ‘which’ as a relative pronoun spread into Russian as an inner-Slavic contact-induced change.

Keywords

relative clausecomplement clausehistorical linguisticssyntaxSlavic languages

Information

Type
Historical Syntax
Information
Language , Volume 93 , Issue 2 , June 2017, pp. e97 - e113
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 Linguistic Society of America

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