Old Russian is an East-Slavic language of the Indo-European language family. Its texts are preserved from the years 1076 -1500 AD. It was used in Kyevan Rus and besides chronicles, the preserved texts include such compositions as The Tale of Igorʼs Campaign or Praying of Daniel the Immured and other known pieces.
Old Russian is a synthetic language with a free word order (though the subject usually takes the position before the verb with the exception of necessity to mark a main meaning word.) As for the noun phrase, the qualitative and ungradable adjectives are preposed to the noun in most cases; rarer they follow the governing noun. Possessive adjectives are fixed in the postposition, which is also typical for attributes in the nominative case. A number of researchers analyzed behaviour of specific adjectives in similar texts and tried to explain it in different ways (for instance, on the basis of the word novgorodskij “of Novgorod”, Worth (1983) shows the causality between the adjective position and animateness or presence of preposition.
Bibliography
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