Russian ‘Spontaneous Inceptive’ Constructions with Partial Grammaticalization of the Verb Pojti : Towards an Analysis of History and Structure

Abstract

The paper investigates the Russian construction of ‘spontaneous inceptive’ consisting of the perfective motion verb pojti and a dependent infinitive (e.g., pošël krošit' ), which emerged at the beginning of the 19th century. The construction conveys the sudden, uncontrolled, and increasingly intense onset of a repetitive (multiplicative) action. Formally, it features emphatic prosody on pojti alongside strict grammatical constraints (a strong preference for finite third-person past-tense forms) and lexical restrictions (incompatibility with homogeneous processes or non-iterative verbs, except for ‘bleached’ predicates like česat' ). The study also examines the impersonal variant i pošlo-poechalo and the peculiar feminine form pošla pisat' , demonstrating that the latter originates in early 19th-century poetic usage (P. A. Vjazemskij) rather than Gogol's Dead Souls . Finally, recent marginal extensions to non-multiplicative contexts are discussed.