| Abstrakt: |
The paper deals with the long-distance usage of the Russian reflexive pronoun sebja when it occurs within an infinitival clause. In this usage, the antecedent of sebja is the subject of the main clause and not the understood subject of the infinitive. Based on the Russian National Corpus data, restrictions on the long-distance usage of sebja are investigated with reference to the Russian language of the nineteenth century and according to the contemporary norm. I identify three factors (the semantic role of sebja, the availability of the local reading of sebja, the empathy locus) that influence the acceptability of the long-distance usage of the reflexive in modern texts, but which played little, if any, role in the texts of the nineteenth century. The study, conducted within a broader project that involved the micro-diachronic analysis of Russian (its grammar and lexicon), illustrates how investigating the earlier periods of a language's life may shed light on the properties of that language today.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
