On a Marginal Use of the Imperative in East Slavic Monuments of the 11th–15th Centuries

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the marginal construction that appears to be a kind of hybrid of an imperative and the future perfect: the auxiliary verb has the form of the imperative mood and is used with an l-participle. The construction is semantically and structurally similar to the Slavic perfect and the Slavic future perfect, however it is attested only in some archaic translated Church Slavonic monuments represented by East Slavic copies from the 11th through the 15th centuries of South Slavic translations (these include the Catechetical Lectures of Cyril of Jerusalem and the Homily to the Entombment and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ by Gregory of Antioch, as a part of the Uspensky Sbornik of the 12th–13th century) or by East Slavic translations of the Story of Ahikar. The author of the article suggests different interpretations of the grammatical state of the construction in question and describes the advantages and disadvantages of each. The following interpretations are offered: 1) regarding the construction as a tracing of the original structure, 2) regarding it as an artificial rhetorical construction, and 3) regarding it as an analytical construction with an auxiliary verb in the imperative mood and the main verb in the form of an l-participle. It seems preferable not to regard the construction as a simple calque of the original structure but rather as a particular archaic perfect imperative periphrasis. It remains unclear, however, whether it was an exclusively literary structure and was used as a possible means of translating Greek constructions with éstō or if it could be used independently.