Accentuation of i-verbs in the Sixteenth-century Chronograph from the E. V. Barsov Collection

Abstract

The present article describes the accentual system of the verbs featuring the thematic vowel -i- in the late 16th-century Chronograph from the E. V. Barsov collection, held in the State Historical Museum in Moscow, catalogue number 1695. One of the tasks of this article is to show the distribution of the i-verbs in the Barsov Chronograph into three accentual paradigms. A table is presented that renders evident the differentiation in particular sub-paradigms of stress in verbs relating to various accentual paradigms. Particular attention is given to accented word forms of the n-participle.

This research project has shown that the i-verbs of the Barsov Chronograph exhibit stress patterns typical for the late sixteenth century, with the exception of three important features, two of which constitute innovations, while the third is an archaism. Firstly, the first-person Present for the accentual paradigm c in the Barsov Chronograph has stress on the ending, like other word forms of the Present tense (in early Old Russian, first person forms are defined as enclinomena, and their transformation into stress-bearing word forms happened in various dialects at various times). Secondly, the l-participle for the accentual paradigm c in the Barsov Chronograph has stress on the suffix (in contrast to the mobile stress that was still broadly present in other texts at that time). Thirdly, the stress in n‑participles of the accentual paradigm b has the same distribution that was reconstructed by A. A. Zaliznyak for early Old Russian, although it has not been observed in a single russian manuscript before.

DOI: 10.31168/2305-6754.2018.7.2.2