East Slavic

Abstract In this final descriptive chapter we discuss the status of clitics in East Slavic (ESl). These include Russian (Rus), to which most of the chapter is devoted, and Belarusian (Br) and Ukrainian (Ukr), which we treat in less detail. These languages are presented for the sake of completeness and play a minimal role in subsequent parts of the book. The reason is that the ESl literary languages lack the kinds of prononimal and auxiliary clitics which are the focus of this study. With the exception of southwestern Ukr dialects, one of which, Hucul, we examine in some detail, “special” clitics were lost in ESL This is in keeping with Jakobson’s (1935/1971) generalization that all inflecting clitics were lost in Rus, with the ramification that pronominal and auxiliary clitics disappeared and the related consequence that the reflexive (or “voice”) morpheme -sja became frozen as such (see also Toman 1999). However, most noninflected (or “simple”) clitics remained intact. As we shall see in our description of Rus, this includes various sentence particles, the conditional marker by, the proclitic negation marker ne, and most famously the Rus interrogative element li.