Potebnja's Conception of East Slavic Morphosyntax Viewed in Its Historical Context

The influence of the late 19th-century Ukrainian scholar Oleksandr Opanasovyc Potebnja on the study of Russian & East Slavic morphosyntax is described, & an outline of his diachronic & typological contributions is presented, placing his work in historical context, particularly the influence of the Romantic tradition & the scholarship of W. von Humboldt. Among Potebnja's achievements are his descriptions of the evolution from Rusian to the Russian of his time, taking into account the resulting Ukrainian & Belorussian forms & structures, as well as his comparative analysis of other Slavic languages & Baltic (Lithuanian, Latvian). His grammar, Iz zapisok po russkoj grammatike (From Notes on Russian Grammar) Vol. 1 (1888), emphasizes syntax, in particular issues of morphosyntax, after defining the word as a linguistic unit. In addition, he discusses the relationship of sentence members, which combine to make up clauses & sentences, & morphologically defined parts of speech. In Vol. 2 (1889), the general problems of Slavic historical grammar are shown, & in Vols. 3 (1899) & 4 (1941), the evolution of the noun & verb & the formal means of expressing predication are described. His theories were unique for the time, based on concrete data, & with an approach that combined typological & theoretical considerations. However, his work focusing on the sentence as the basic unit & his influence were sidelined in his own time by F. F. Fortunatov's approach to Indo-European studies, which were embedded in a neogrammatical, formalistic method, which proceeded from the morpheme to the word. 11 References. B. Gadalla