Чтение онлайн

The bare impersonal form without any expression of the agent is nowadays very common, possibly influenced by the literary Russian past passive predicates with — no/- to[M. S. Fedina, paper presented at the International Congress of MAPRIJAL, June 1998, Syktyvkar].

The newness of the Komi possessive impersonal construction can only be presumed, since there is no mention of them in old grammars and descriptions. Perhaps accidentally, there seem to be no examples in the folkloric texts available, which represent the state of the language at the beginning of the XXth century. In the Komi prose of the 1930s, the construction becomes more common in the texts of individual writers. Earlier grammars written by native linguists do not mention it, except the grammar of 1949 by D. V. Bubrih. He gives examples of the 2nd past (=perfect) transitive and reflexive verbs and translates them by using the north Russian impersonal constructions with passive participial predicates:

The new Komi grammar lists the uses of the genitive agent as follows:

1) a real active subject:

a) in an attributive construction with the participial form:

b) with the perfect:

2) a passive subject: someone does something because of being told to do so, or someone is in a state:

a) with verbs of passive meaning ( vunny «be-forgotten», byrny «be finished», mynny «pass (about time)», artmyny «come out (of state)», vosny «vanish, be lost» etc.

b) with the reflexive suffix — s' :

c) with modal predicates:

d) the subject of certain phraseological predicates indicating non-voluntary state ( vez pet"o «to want something», lit. «desire comes out») [Fedjunjova 2000: 66].

To illustrate the difference between the possessive impersonal construction and the impersonal construction expressing involuntary action with the reflexive suffix, some citations and an excerpt from the history is in order. The eminent Komi linguist, V. I. Lytkin (Illa Vas'), was arrested in 1930 and accused of national bourgeois tendencies and espionage. He had just returned from Hungary, and, occupied as he was with studying, writing poems and publishing them he had no idea about what was going on at home. On returning to the USSR, he was publicly criticized, and he made a full «confession», explaining his motives with all the possibilities of subject demotion available in the language.

First, he wrote that he had answered the critics, but the text had not been published:

Lytkin continues to excuse himself by thanking the critics who had opened his eyes to many blemishes in his text Munflny: it was neither a poem or a poema, but something in between, and it would not produce any great ideas.

In the first case, the agent is not expressed, but the construction is impersonall, thus the responsibility is to some extent hidden and avoided. The pluperfect with the copula v"oli has here apparently the same function as the past-in-past of the Western European («Standard Average European») pluperfect. In the second example, the reflexive suffix expressly removes the responsibility of the author, the event just happened without his volition. The objects are retained, as is shown by the morphological markers. In the third example, the authorship is shown, but again demoted by the genitive form, although the verb form is the perfect without the reflexive suffix. Thus it only shows the resulting state. The critics' part in this is based on the result, and the perfect of the verb «understand» has a clear evidential meaning: the critics must have understood the author's words in a certain way. The author tries to avoid their interpretation by using the quotative particle p"o. The last predicate in the simple past k"osji «I wanted», shows what the author did intentionally and in full consciousness.

The impersonal constructions based on the participle — "om(a) are, as was noted in the beginning, neutral. One of the fullest descriptions of Komi from the XDCth century states:

That is, there is no formally marked passive in Komi, and the analytic constructions with instrumental agents that appear in grammars are obvious loan translations from Russian (E. A. Cypanov in [Fedjunjova 2000: 282]). In earlier grammatical descriptions, e. g. [Lytkin 1955], such constructions are claimed to represent genuine Komi passive forms. The tradition has been faithfully continued until today, and has taken root in modem written Komi (see e. g. [Ludykova 1993]).

As in the historical development of languages with habere perfects, a predilection of the possessive impersonal construction to be used with transitive verbs is apparent in Komi, at least with respect to the frequencies of transitive and intransitive verbs. With transitives, it is often difficult to decide whether the genitive should be interpreted purely as the possessor of an item, or as the agent responsible for the action; it can be both. P. Doronin, a prolific writer who began publishing in the 1930s used the construction with transitives, verbs both with and without an object. In all cases, the interpretation as an evidential is possible, since it often coincides with the basic meaning of the forms with — oma, that of a state resulting from an event/action in the past: