Vz'amsi, Sotsi, and the Role of Hierarchy in Morphological Variations

Dialect variation in the perfective verbal adverb suffix realized as -vshi in Contemporary Standard Russian is explained in terms of the origin of the suffix as the nominative singular feminine short form of the past active participle; the suffix was added to the second or past/infinitive stem of the verb & had the allomorph -shi after a consonant stem. The variant -mshi, widespread in Southern & Moscow Russian, is derived from a reanalysis of the past active participle of the consonant stem vzem- 'to take', with replacement of the root vowel e by the past stem vowel a to produce vzyamshi; similarly, the geographically restricted variants -tshi/-tchi derive from reanalysis of shedshi 'having gone'. The variant -lshi arose in a small western region through morphophonemic neutralization of coda /l/ & /v/ as [w] & subsequent reanalysis of -vshi based on use of the participle as an independent past predicate. References. J. Hitchcock