Los infinitivos en eslavo antiguo y su origen nominal

Abstract

In this study, I describe the archaic traits of the infinitive structures in early Slavic, and show that they are relicts of a previous linguistic situation, in which infinitives originated from verbal nominalizations in adverbial position, modified by diverse grammatical cases. More specifically, we analyze the following properties of these constructions: matrix infinitive clauses with declarative value; the existence of different infinitive forms derived from distinct grammatical cases; the use of final non-finite clauses in the absence of a subordinating complementizer; and the syntactic independence of those infinitive clauses, which are semantically dependent on a finite matrix verb (lack of temporal reference dependency and free reference of the non-finite subject). In contrast, we offer examples of later periods in which these properties had already been lost.