SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF IMPERSONAL FORMS IN -NO, -TO IN SLAVIC LANGUAGES

Abstract

The article describes the status and origin of the forms ending in -no, -to in Slavic linguistics. Special attention is given to their distinctive role in Slavic languages, particularly in Ukrainian and Polish. The semantic and morphological peculiarities of these forms in Slavic languages are examined, emphasizing their hybrid nature. It is shown that only in Polish and Ukrainian do these forms differ from passive participles and have become a specific morphological phenomenon, while in Czech and Russian they remain within the participial paradigm. The syntactic features of impersonal forms ending in -no, -to in Slavic languages are compared. The following sentence patterns with forms ending in -no, -to are distinguished: genitive, which has two object varieties: genitive partitive and genitive proper-object. This type is infrequent in Polish and Ukrainian. The dative pattern, characteristic of verb forms with dative government, and the instrumental pattern, which uses the instrumental case for instruments, means, manner, or cause, are also infrequent. The locative pattern manifests itself in incomplete constructions where the locative is omitted. The accusative pattern, typical in Ukrainian and Polish, involves the ability to govern mostly the accusative case of a direct object in a resultative state. The accusative pattern is further divided into several types: negative, propositional, and infinitive. Ukrainian impersonal sentences with verb forms ending in -no, -to and a direct object in the accusative case usually correspond to Czech two-word passive constructions or indefinitepersonal sentences, and they can also convey not only human actions but also natural physical phenomena that are not dependent on human will. All these syntactic types of using forms ending in -no, -to are analyzed in contemporary texts of Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, and Serbian, extracted from the National Corpora of these languages.