Russian Prefix Innerverbal Word Formation in the Light of Indo-European Sources

Abstract

Prefixes, like prepositions, trace back to the immutable words, close to adverbial - relational elements, which took an autonomous position with respect to the verb, and to the name. Position and function of these words are associated by researchers with the transition from one structure of proto-indo-european syntactic core to the other: from OV to VO (where V - verb, O - object). When releasing the left valence verb relational elements became preverbs. By their functions they approached to the first part of a compound word, which served as the spatial specifier. In the early period of the Proto-Slavic local prefixes were labeled as statal and directive verbs. Within the semantic fusion of root with prefix there is a transition from the semantic agglutination to fusion, that was a consequence of the development of all prefixes the meanings of saturatedness and performance. This led, in particular, to the disappearance of spatial positional verbs prefixes because the statal bases contradicted the spatial ultimacy of prefixes: обстояти городъ – stand around the city. The appeared meanings of ultimacy and resultiveness of prefixes, became, on the one hand, one of the sources of the category of the species, on the other – the basis for the development of modification and mutation types of word-formation. These lines of development of innerverbal prefix word formation in the history of the Slavic, and the Russian in particular, languages would be impossible without the appearance of tracing back to PIE relational elements adverbial prepositions, without increasing their role in the development of free prepositional-case forms.

Keywords

• Proto-Indo-European language
• verbal prefixes
• the history of the Russian language