Zero forms in morphological paradigms. The verb “BE” in Russian
Anton Zimmerling
August 2024 

This paper offers a corpus analysis of the Russian verb BYT' ‘be’ which has an abnormal present tense paradigm including a zero form BE.PRES and overt forms EST'.BE.PRES and SUT'.BE.PRES which do not discriminate person and number and are distributed syntactically. The peripheral status of overt present BE-forms compared with the zero BE.PRES in the Russian National Corpus is confirmed by three measures: 1) dispersion of texts where BE-form occur; 2) uneven coverage in different persons and numbers; 3) ratio of copular uses vs content verb uses. 1-2 person present tense BE-forms attested in RNC are internal borrowings from Old Russian and Old Church Slavonic, while EST' and SUT' are inherited 3rd person elements which take over 1-2 person uses.The frequency of the zero copula BE.PRES can be measured on the basis of the systemic proportion between present vs past tense uses of BE and on the basis of approximation samples for contexts where overt present tense copulas alternate with the zero BE.PRES.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008337 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Computational linguistics and intellectual technologies. Issue 19 (26). Proceedings of the international conference "Dialogue 2020". 2020, 795 - 810. DOI 10.28995/2075-7182-2020-19-795-810
keywords:	agreement paradigms, tense, copula, existential verb, text corpora, dispersion, syntax, phonology, semantics, morphology
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