Historical development of labile verbs in modern Russian

Abstract

The article deals with the phenomenon of lability (ambitransitivity), in other words, the ability of a verb to be either transitive or intransitive. I analyze the historical development of verbs which are currently labile in modern Russian. The main group of Russian labile verbs includes verbs of motion. On the basis of corpus and dictionary data, I conclude that the behavior of the lexemes under analysis is far from being uniform. However, interestingly, for most of them, e.g., lit’ ‘flow/pour’, gonjat’ ‘run, drive/chase, pursue’, and kružit’ ‘go round, turn, roll’, the proportion of the intransitive use grows throughout the period under analysis, though for the verb kapat’/kapnut’ ‘drop, pour in drips’, in contrast, the transitive use becomes more and more frequent.

In the cases when the intransitive use becomes more frequent, the semantic change matches the statistical one. In the beginning, verbs of this subtype were only used intransitively in a restricted type of contexts (e.g., for gonjat’ ‘run, drive/chase, pursue’, hunting contexts represent this restricted class), where the intransitive use might be a result of object omission. Later on, the semantic range of the intransitive use became wider and the lability was no longer semantically related to object omission. I conclude that the emergence of an intransitive use of a strictly transitive verb or the increase of the number of intransitive uses is often accompanied by semantic changes: first, a verb is used intransitively in a very restricted range of contexts (for the verb gonjat’ these include hunting contexts). Then, the range of contexts and the semantics of the intransitive use becomes wider, the number of intransitive uses grows and the verb becomes canonically labile with both uses being equally or almost equally frequent. Importantly, the borderline between A- and P-lability is not as strict as it is put sometimes: P-lability (the causative/non-causative alternation) can in some cases be traced back to A-lability (object omission).