The Softening Clitic of Avvakum's Seventeenth-Century Autobiography and Gil&soft;ferding's Nineteenth-Century Onega Byliny
James Anthony
Weller
The Russian language is in possession of a clitic
-ka which functions as an intensifier when used
with pronouns and adverbs, but as a softener when used with
imperatives. Hypothetically, a sentence such as tut-ka
daj-ka mne-ka otdoxnut&soft; let me rest
here could be produced exemplifying the workings of this
particular clitic. However, the difference in meanings between
-ka used with pronouns and adverbs, as opposed to
-ka used with imperatives, strikes one as
contradictory. Why on the one hand does -ka add
a sense of intensification, while on the other it softens? I believe
there is an historical explanation for this dichotomy. Synchronically
we are dealing with a single clitic -ka, but
diachronically we have two distinct clitics: -ka
and -tko.
There is an intensifying clitic -ka known to
all three branches of Slavic that is used with pronouns and adverbs in
a consistently similar manner. There is also the imperative clitic
-tko/ used by Archpriest Avvakum in the
seventeenth century which had two allomorphs: post-vocalically he used
[-tko], but post-consonantally [-ko]. Avvakum did not use
-ka as an imperative clitic. But by the late
nineteenth century the situation had changed. In 1871
A. F. Gil&soft;ferding published a three-volume collection of byliny
under the name One&zhachek;skie byliny. These Onega
byliny are replete with instances of -ka used
with pronouns and adverbs, but only rarely with imperatives. Of the
fifty-one of Gil&soft;ferding's informants who provided enough tokens
of the softening clitic to be conclusive, twenty demonstrated the same
distribution as Avvakum: -tko was used
post-vocalically, but -ko post-consonantally.
However, five informants used only -ko regardless
of the phonetic environment. The remaining twenty-six informants
showed that a change was underway: the -ko
allomorph was gradually spreading to the post-vocalic environment at
the expense of -tko. Consequently, data from
Avvakum and the Onega informants show that the imperative clitic in
this okanie dialect was -tko or
-ko (itself derived from
-tko), not -ka.
The Onega byliny demonstrate yet another outstanding phenomenon
with regards to the intensifying clitic -ka:
although the imperative clitic is clearly -tko
and, to a lesser extent, -ko,
-ka is frequently encountered, though strictly as
an intensifier of pronouns and adverbs. On the basis of this
observation, I conclude that, although Standard Russian makes use of a
single clitic -ka which has two seemingly
contradictory meanings, the intensifying clitic used with pronouns and
adverbs is etymologically distinct from the imperative clitic
-tko (and -ko.
One Lake Onega informant, in addition to his use of
-ko as the softening clitic, used the form
-tka, which had two allomorphs: post-vocalically
he used -tka, but post-consonantally he used
-ka. Farther south in akanie dialects, the same
clitic -tka appears with the same two
allomorphs. This suggests that the softening clitic
-tka of akanie dialects probably derives from
-tko, only in akanie dialects the clitic came to
be analyzed as having an underlying a.
Consequently, I conclude that the etymology of the softening clitic
-ka is twofold—although it is possible that
speakers innovated by extending the intensifying clitic
-ka to imperatives, in some instances speakers
use a clitic -ka which ultimately derives from
-tko (-tko >
-tka > -ka). That is, a
development took place in akanie dialects similar to the one in
progress around Lake Onega in the late nineteenth century. That
development is demonstrated by one Onega informant, but corroborated
in data from neighboring dialects. Thus, the softening clitic
-ka (of either origin) eventually suppleted
-tko, -ko and
-tka in most dialects leaving behind a semantic
dichotomy.