Clitics in Prosta Mova. The Usage of Pronouns and Particles in 1489 Menaion Reader (Chet’ya-Mineya)

Abstract

The article addresses the functions of pronouns and some non-pronominal clitics in the Prosta Mova. As a corpus it uses the 1489 Menaion Reader (Chet’ya-Mineya). In the capacity of the 1st person singular pronoun, the Church Slavonic form азъ (az) is used in the speech attributed to God, while the form я (ya) is used in the speech attributed to apostles and prophets. One of the characteristic features of the text is the frequent use of the reflexive pronoun sam ‘(one)self,’ which can express coreference with the sentence subject and functionally approach the category of reflexivity. The clitic ся (sya) occurs in Chet’ya in well-established syntactic clichés.

The article also describes the functions of the particle бы (by), used in the text as a conjunction in the clause-initial position; and of the interrogative particle чи (chi) close in the meaning to the Modern Russian particles разве, неужели (razve, neuzheli).

The text frequently uses the correlative construction with the relative pronoun хто (khto) or (less often) котор¥и, sometimes modified by the universal quantifier вс­къ. The correlate then is the pronoun to ‘that’.

Received 11 June 2025

Revised 20 November 2025

Accepted 24 November 2025

For citation: Smirnova, E. A., 2025. Clitics in Prosta Mova. The Usage of Pronouns and Particles in 1489 Menaion Reader (Chet’ya-Mineya). Slavic World in the Third Millennium, 20 (3–4), pp. 237–250. https://doi.org/10.31168/2412-6446.2025.20.3-4.11