What drives paradigm change? Analogy, deponency, and verbal aspect in the history of dati / dajati / davati

The paradigm of the verbs for ‘to give’ in modern Russian, dat’ pf. and davat’ ipf. , has undergone significant changes over the course of the centuries. These changes originated in the imperative and proceeded to also affect the perfective present tense paradigm. This study, based on material from the birchbark documents written in the Old Novgorodian dialect, proposes a combination of factors as reasons for these paradigm changes as well as a chronology of the individual changes. The shifts started with the imperative dajь of the old imperfective form dajati , which developed perfective semantics and can thus be interpreted as a type of deponency. Due to analogy to dati the originally imperfective imperative became associated with the perfective stem over time. This makes the initial perfective imperative dažь redundant as such but drives it into the indicative (modern Russian dašь ), benefitting from analogy to the thematic present tense endings. The lack of an unambiguously imperfective imperative for ‘to give’ is consequently filled by the form davati with the imperative davajь . This paper also underlines the importance of the birchbark documents for historical studies of Old East Slavic since they seem to reflect (some) changes in the language significantly earlier than other documents from the same time period.