Jesse Tseng (CNRS, Loria UMR 7503) and Anna Kupść (Université Nancy 2, Loria UMR
7503, IPIPAN Warsaw)
A cross-linguistic approach to Slavic past tense and conditional
constructions
1. Introduction*
The aim of this paper is to provide a formal account of the related but quite varied
manifestations of the past tense and conditional mood constructions in several Slavic
languages. We first present an overview of the historical development of these constructions
starting from Common Slavic. In the formal section of the paper we begin with a review of
our analysis (Kupść & Tseng 2005) of the relevant structures in Polish within the grammatical
framework of HPSG (Pollard & Sag 1994). We then go on to show how diachronic and
comparative considerations allow an extension of our approach to Czech, Serbo-Croatian, and
Russian, assuming the same set of grammatical features and analytical tools. We conclude by
proposing a model of syntactic change made possible by overlapping analyses.
2. Historical origins and modern diversity
All across the Slavic family, the past tense and the conditional mood are formed with the “lparticiple” form of the verb (henceforth “l-form”), so called because it involves a stem
originally ending in l, followed by an agreement ending (the l-form agrees with the subject of
the clause in number and gender). Historically, the past tense was a compound tense
consisting of the l-form in combination with a present tense form of the auxiliary BE. The
conditional mood consisted of the l-form along with a conditional form of BE. (Decaux 1955)
(1)
common Slavic: present tense of BE used in past tense
1st
2nd
3rd
(2)
SG
PL
jesmĭ
jesi
jestĭ, jestŭ
jesmŭ
jeste
sõtĭ, sõtŭ
common Slavic: conditional forms of BE
1st
2nd
3rd
SG
PL
byxŭ
by
by
byxomŭ
byste
byšę
Since the Common Slavic period, the auxiliary forms in the past tense and conditional
constructions have evolved in different ways, giving rise to the variety of structures observed
in the modern Slavic languages. We can observe variation in the following dimensions:
 degree of syntactic and functional autonomy
 degree of prosodic autonomy
 linear position in the clause
*
The authors wish to thank the audience at FDSL6 in Potsdam for their comments, and the
following colleagues for help with data: Nadira Aljović, Alexander Rosen, Hana Skoumalová,
Hana Skrabalova, Dmitry Sustretov.
We note a general tendency for the forms in question to develop from fully autonomous,
unrestricted syntactic elements into highly constrained bound morphemes—the classic cline
of grammaticalization observed in the historical development of auxiliaries crosslinguistically. But each particular auxiliary form takes its own unique path along this cline, at
its own speed, and so at any given moment we can expect to find elements with quite
divergent properties, in spite of their common historical origins.
3. The analysis of Polish
In the development of modern Polish, the forms in (1), used in combination with the l-form to
form the past tense, developed into a set of inflectional endings in the 1st and 2nd persons,
and disappeared altogether in the 3rd person:
(3)
Polish past tense endings:
1st
2nd
3rd
SG
PL
-(e)m
-(e)ś
–
-śmy
-ście
–
The present tense of BE in Polish preserves the 3rd person forms in (1); the 1st and 2nd person
forms are re-formations based on the 3sg stem jest- and the endings in (3).
(4)
Polish present tense of be (być):
1st
2nd
3rd
SG
PL
jestem
jesteś
jest
jesteśmy
jesteście
są
It is important to emphasize that the past tense endings (3) cannot be treated as phonologically
reduced variants of (4), given the diachronic facts just mentioned, and because the forms in
(4) can never be used to form the past tense.
As described by Andersen (1987), in earlier stages of the language, the past tense agreement
elements appeared obligatorily in “second position”, but later acquired a freer distribution. In
modern Polish they appear most frequently directly after the l-form (5a), but they can also be
hosted by another word (pronoun, noun, adverb, adjective, conjunction) somewhere to the left
of the l-form (within the same clause). Such “floating” endings most often attach to the first
element of the clause, thus ending up in second position (5b), but other positions are also
possible, and an ending can even be found embedded inside another constituent (5c):
(5)
a.
b.
c.
Ty widziałeś ten film.
you seel-2sg that film
‘You saw this film.’
Tyś
widział ten film.
you-2sg seel
that film
Już
dawno [dobregom filmu] nie widział.
already long [good-1sg film] NEG seel
‘I haven’t seen a good film in a long time’
(suffix on l-form)
(“floating” ending)
(within an NP)
The phonological properties of these endings, discussed in Bański (2000), suggest that these
elements should be treated as suffixes rather than syntactic words. The evidence is
particularly clear when the endings are attached to the l-form: they trigger vowel epenthesis,
rightward stress shift, and vowel quality alternations in the verbal root. Furthermore, in
coordinated verbal structures, the ending must be repeated on each l-form. When the endings
float to the left and attach to a non-verbal host, they have somewhat different properties, but
they still obey phonological restrictions that are more typical of suffixes than of words (at
least in the singular).
In our HPSG analysis of l-form constructions in Polish, set out in detail in Kupść & Tseng
(2005), we treat the past tense as a simple tense, involving a single verb (the l-form). In other
words, we do not assume a compound tense construction involving an auxiliary verb, in
contrast to previous proposals (Borsley & Rivero 1994, Borsley 1999, Kupść 2000). In an
approach without empty categories, this is the only analysis available for the 3rd person. The
suffixal nature of the 1st and 2nd person markings is also incompatible with auxiliary verb
status. Instead, to account for the distribution of these forms, we introduce a system of
constraints for triggering and satisfying agreement requirements in l-form constructions.
Formally, for all signs, we define two lists called AGR(EEMENT)-TRIG(GER) and AGR(EEMENT)MARK(ING), which can each contain at most one agreement index. We assume that l-forms
with a 1st or 2nd person subject have an AGR-TRIG list containing the index of this subject,
and a non-empty AGR-TRIG specification has to be discharged by a corresponding AGR-MARK
value, provided by one of the suffixes in (3). (An l-form with a 3rd person subject has an
empty AGR-TRIG list and requires no additional agreement mark.) In the simplest case, a nonempty AGR-TRIG requirement can be satisfied by attaching the appropriate suffix to the l-form
itself, as in example (5a). In cases of floating agreement marking like (5b-c), the l-form’s
AGR-TRIG requirement must be satisfied in the course of the syntactic derivation, because the
required AGR-MARK element is introduced at a distance from the l-form.
The general mechanism consists of two stages. First, within the projection of the l-form, the
AGR-TRIG value propagates systematically from the head daughter, while the AGR-MARK
values of all daughters are taken into account; this is formalized by the constraint on phrases
in (7). Then, a verbal projection bearing matching AGR-MARK and AGR-TRIG specifications
can be interpreted as a past tense structure, with both agreement features discharged, thanks to
the syntactic rule in (8), which is expressed as a unary rewrite rule.
(7)
Propagation of AGR-MARK and AGR-TRIG
(8)
Agreement discharge rule (simplified)
The structures of examples (5a–b) are sketched below. They illustrate: the non-empty AGRTRIG specification on l-forms, the introduction of AGR-MARK by agreement suffixation, the
propagation of these features in phrasal combinations as required by (7), and their discharge
and past tense interpretation by the unary verbal projection rule in (8).
(9)
a. Example (5a) with suffix on l-form
b. Example (5b) with floating agreement suffix
To form the conditional mood in Polish, the l-form verb is combined with an inflected form of
the element by, which has a complete paradigm, including 3rd person forms:
(10) Polish conditional auxiliary:
1st
2nd
3rd
SG
PL
bym
byś
by
byśmy
byście
by
The Common Slavic forms indicated in (2) became second position clitics in Old Polish. The
original endings were gradually replaced by the past tense markings in (3) with neutralization
of number in the 3rd person, and the forms of the auxiliary began migrating to other positions
in the clause. In modern Polish they appear in the same positions as the past tense agreement
suffixes: either immediately after the l-form or somewhere to its left.
(11) a.
b.
Ty widziałbyś
ten film.
you seel-COND.2sg that film
‘You would see that film.’
Ty byś
widział ten film.
you COND.2sg seel
that film
Conditional by is thus an enclitic element, but there is no evidence for analyzing it as a suffix.
Unlike the past tense suffixes, by imposes no phonological restrictions on its host, and
triggers no phonological effects such as epenthesis or stress shift. To account for these
observations, we propose an auxiliary analysis of the forms of by, with the following lexical
description:
(12) Polish conditional auxiliary
The auxiliary is a subject-raising verbal head selecting an l-form verbal complement.
Although it is a syntactic word, it is also a prosodically deficient clitic, and thus subject to the
special clitic placement rules of Polish. Such rules (for Polish and for the other languages
discussed in the paper) can be formalized in HPSG using constraints on word order domains
(Reape 1994), but we will not go into the details of this part of the analysis here. The
auxiliary introduces a MARKING value (allowing syntactic selection of conditional clauses)
and semantic content associated with the conditional mood (for which we provide no formal
account).
The additional constraints on the VP complement in (12) ensure that no superfluous past tense
suffixes are realized within the l-form projection (13a), and the [–NEG] specification makes
the conditional auxiliary incompatible with the negative prefix nie (13b). Negation can only
be expressed on the l-form (13c).
(13) a.
b.
c.
*Ty byś
widziałeś ten film.
you COND.2sg seel-2sg that film
‘You would see that film.’
*Ty nie byś
widział tego filmu.
you NEG COND.2sg seel
that film
Ty byś
nie widział tego filmu.
you COND.2sg NEG seel
that film
‘You would not see that film.’
We assume that the same l-form is used in the conditional and in the past tense. One
consequence of our analysis is that the AGR-TRIG requirement of the l-form (in the 1st and 2nd
persons) is left unsatisfied in conditional mood constructions. This is not problematic,
however, because once the auxiliary by takes over as the head of the construction, the l-form’s
AGR-TRIG value is no longer propagated, in accordance with (7).
The description in (12) does not include any specification of the AGR-MARK and AGR-TRIG
values on the auxiliary itself. As mentioned above, the paradigm of by in (10)—in contrast to
the earlier conditional forms shown in (2)—is completely regular, consisting of the stem byplus endings that look exactly like (3). So it would be easy to treat the forms of by as suffixed
words, with a non-empty AGR-MARK value satisfying the AGR-TRIG requirement inherited
from the l-form complement. The introduction of this triggering and discharge machinery is
not positively motivated, however, because in conditional constructions, the agreement
endings are totally inseparable from by:
(14) a.
b.
*Ty by widziałeś ten film.
you COND seel-2sg that film
*Tyś
by
widział ten film.
you-2sg COND seel
that film
For the moment, therefore, we make the more conservative assumption that the conditional
auxiliary simply has empty AGR-TRIG and AGR-MARK specifications, although future
developments in the language may indicate a more complex interaction. We return to this
general question at the end of this paper.
4. Extension to Czech
In the Czech past tense, the l-form combines with elements that still look like the present
tense forms of BE (with less stylistic variation), although as in Polish (3), there is no
additional element in 3rd person past tense constructions:
(15) Czech
a. past tense elements
1st
2nd
3rd
SG
PL
jsem
jsi / -s
–
jsme
jste
–
b. present tense of BE (být)
1st
2nd
3rd
SG
PL
jsem
jsi / (colloq.) jseš
je / (arch.) jest
jsme
jste
jsou
The absence of 3rd person forms makes a uniform auxiliary analysis impossible. The 1st and
2nd person forms seem to be syntactic words, but they are clitics that must be realized in
second position (in contrast to the copular forms in (15b), which can occur sentence-initially).
These properties are compatible with either an auxiliary analysis (similar to the one we
propose for Polish conditional by) or with an agreement marking analysis (similar to the
Polish past tense, but with agreement elements introduced by special syntactic combination
schemas rather than morphologically). We choose the second approach for the following
reasons:
 The formal mechanism for AGR-MARK/AGR-TRIG amalgamation and discharge proposed
for Polish in (7) and (8) can be re-used with no modifications. The l-form introduces
an AGR-TRIG requirement that must be satisfied by the realization of the appropriate
agreement element elsewhere in the clause.
 No additional lexical operations (cf. Borsley 1999 for Polish) are needed to account for
the absence of an auxiliary in the 3rd person. With a 3rd person subject, the l-form
simply has an empty AGR-TRIG list.
 The 2sg form -s is most likely an affix (or quickly becoming one). It cannot simply be a
phonologically reduced variant of jsi, because it has a different distribution (16b).1 It
has more or less the same status as the Polish mobile suffixes, so in this case the head
of the past tense construction can only be the l-form.
(16) a.
b.
Koho jsi viděl? /
who
2sg seel /
‘Who did you see?’
Ty jsi se
smál.
you 2sg REFL laughl
‘You laughed.’
Kohos
viděl?
who-2sg seel
/ Ty ses
smál. / ?*Tys se
smál.
/ you REFL-2sg laughl / you-2sg REFL laughl
Furthermore, the Czech past tense agreement forms cannot carry negation. In other words, the
negated forms of být (nejsem, nejsi, není, …) cannot be used in the past tense construction;
negation can only appear on the l-form, as in the Polish past tense. The forms in (15a) are thus
only a short step behind their Polish counterparts in terms of grammaticalization, and the
analysis that we propose accommodates this fact directly. The main difference between the
two languages is not really the syntactic status of their past tense agreement elements, but
their linear distribution: Czech has a strong second position constraint, while the Polish
There is evidence that -s can occur outside of the second position clitic cluster (but speakers’
judgments seem to vary widely here):
(i)
Proč(-s/jsi) často(-s/*jsi) chválil(-s/??jsi) Petra?
why (2sg) often (2sg) praisel (2sg) Peter
‘Why did you often praise Peter?’
(adapted from L. Veselovská, http://oldwww.upol.cz/resources/English/
FDSL 2003 in English.pdf)
1
mobile suffixes have a freer distribution (with a strong preference for suffixation to the lform).
The conditional mood in Czech can be analyzed almost exactly as in Polish (modulo word
order), involving an inflected auxiliary clitic with the following paradigm:
(17) Czech conditional auxiliary:
1st
2nd
3rd
SG
PL
bych
bys / by … -s
by
bychom / bysme
byste
by
Comparing (2), (10), and (17), we can see that Czech is again slightly more conservative than
Polish, but we observe a similar tendency towards regularization of the conditional paradigm
(for example, the emergence of non-standard bysme alongside bychom). The case of the 2nd
person singular requires special attention. Here we have an exceptional case where the ending
on the conditional auxiliary is separable. But the split variant is found only in combination
with the reflexive clitics si and se, giving rise obligatorily to the clusters by sis and by ses.
This is a highly restricted instance of mobile affixation that does not motivate the introduction
of the entire AGR-MARK/AGR-TRIG apparatus into all conditional structures (discussed above as
a possibility for Polish). We suggest instead that this should be handled by special constraints
that apply specifically to second position clitic clusters. This is a part of the grammar of
Czech (and other languages) where we find highly idiosyncratic phenomena allowing
interactions of phonology, morphology, and syntax that are ordinarily prohibited by principles
of modularity.
5. Extension to Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian (SC), unlike Czech and Polish, preserves past tense markers in all persons.
These are most often realized as clitics in second position, with forms identical to the
unaccented present tense forms of BE (18a).
(18) SC past tense auxiliary = present tense of BE (biti):
a. unaccented
b. accented / negated
1st
2nd
3rd
SG
PL
sam
si
je / –
smo
ste
su
1st
2nd
3rd
SG
PL
jesam / nisam
jesi / nisi
jest(e) / nije
jesmo / nismo
jeste / niste
jesu / nisu
Furthermore, the accented and negated present tense forms of biti (18b) can also be used in
past tense constructions. These properties of SC contrast with Czech and Polish, where the
elements involved in the past tense are clearly distinct from the present tense forms of BE, and
where negation can only appear on the l-form in the past tense. The accented SC forms appear
in contexts unavailable for the unaccented forms, for example in sentence-initial position:
(19) Jesmo/*Smo vid(j)eli Mariju.
1pl
seel
Marija
‘We saw Marija.’
The 3sg form je presents some particularities. It obeys distinct ordering constraints in clitic
clusters: it always comes last, whereas the other forms (18a) are required to precede all
pronominal clitics. The accented form jest(e) generally cannot replace je in past tense
constructions, but sometimes je itself can be accented (e.g., in sentence-initial position with
the interrogative focus particle li). In certain contexts je can be omitted, for example after the
reflexive clitic se (20), especially in informal spoken registers. When preceded by the 3sg
feminine pronominal clitic (ordinarily also je), the resulting cluster is realized as ju je, not *je
je (21).
(20) a.
b.
(21) a.
b.
?On se
je oženio.
he REFL 3sg marryl
‘He got married.'
On se oženio.
*On je je vidio jutros.
he her 3sg seel this-morning
‘He saw her this morning.'
On ju je vidio jutros.
Leaving these details to one side for the moment, the past tense in SC can be analyzed
straightforwardly as an auxiliary construction—that is, an independent verb (with a full
paradigm) selecting a VP complement headed by an l-form. This is essentially a continuation
of the situation in Common Slavic, except that in SC the auxiliary is typically realized as a
second-position clitic. We propose the following lexical entry for these forms:
(22) SC past tense auxiliary clitic
Compare this with the lexical description proposed in (12) for the Polish (and Czech)
conditional auxiliary (ignoring the obvious differences in semantic content and grammatical
marking): the SC past tense auxiliary is compatible with negation, and it imposes minimal
constraints on its VP complement. The most striking contrast with respect to Polish and
Czech, however, is of course the absence of any AGR-MARK/AGR-TRIG interaction. This
mechanism (which effectively allows the l-form to select another element in the clause) is
technically unnecessary, since the auxiliary can be relied on to drive the syntactic derivation.
At the same time, nothing prevents us from adopting the same analysis of the l-form as in
Polish and Czech (i.e., with a positive AGR-TRIG specification in the 1st and 2nd persons).
And in fact, the remarks above concerning the omission of je suggest that this additional
agreement system could be necessary in Serbo-Croatian after all. Whereas phenomena like
*je je > ju je in (21) and the Czech data discussed in the previous section (*bys si > by sis)
could be taken to be highly idiosyncratic but superficial “readjustement” effects with no
consequences for the syntactic analysis, the total absence of an element as in (20b) is more
problematic. The SC past tense auxiliary seems to be losing its lexical autonomy, starting
with the 3rd person, in exactly the same way that grammaticalization has already affected
Polish and Czech. We return to the question of modelling such changes at the end of the
paper.
In SC conditional constructions, the l-form appears in combination with the inflected
auxiliary bi (another second position clitic):
(23) SC conditional auxiliary:
1st
2nd
3rd
SG
PL
bih
bi
bi
bismo
biste
bi
Although the SC conditional auxiliaries are still quite close to the original Common Slavic
forms in (2), we observe a tendency towards regularization of the paradigm (also in progress
in Czech and completely achieved in Polish).
The formal analysis presented for the conditional in Czech and Polish, formalized in (12), can
be adopted with minimal modifications. As in the SC past tense, negation can appear on the
auxiliary (ne bih, ne bi, etc.) so the constraint [–NEG] must be removed. The specification
[AGR-MARK  ] on the VP complement can be maintained, as it is technically correct (though
for the moment irrelevant). As in the other two languages, we assume that the clitic
specification triggers the application of the appropriate word order principles.
5. The case of Russian
Russian stands out from the other Slavic languages considered in this paper because most of
the forms we have been discussing are simply absent. The present tense paradigm of BE (byt’)
has almost totally fallen out of use (both for the past tense and in present tense copular
structures). Moreover, while the 3rd person forms are systematically the first to disappear in
Polish, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian, the sole surviving form in Russian is 3rd singular est’,
which can now appear under certain conditions with all subjects.
There are no agreement markers at all in the past tense; in all persons, the l-form alone is used
to express the past tense.
(24) Ja / Ty / On videl tot fil’m.
I / you / he seel that film
‘I/You/He saw that film.’
The l-form obviously must be the head of the construction. If we consider Russian on its own,
there is no reason to assume the agreement features AGR-TRIG and AGR-MARK in the formal
analysis. In the cross-Slavic model that we have been developing here, we can simply say that
Russian l-forms have an empty AGR-TRIG value, and that there are no elements (words or
affixes) that introduce an AGR-MARK index. Alternatively, we could assume that (1st and 2nd
person) l-forms do have a non-empty AGR-TRIG list, just as in all of the other languages, and
that in Russian, a matching AGR-MARK specification is introduced by lexical or constructional
constraints, thus triggering the discharge rule (8). For the moment we have no conclusive
empirical motivation for such a proposal; the only argument is the cross-linguistic parallelism.
The conditional mood in Russian involves the l-form and the invariant element by (sometimes
reduced to b). An auxiliary analysis of by would be possible, but nothing really favors this
approach. On the other hand, by has no verbal properties (such as inflection), and word order
and coordination facts suggest that it can combine with all verbal projections (not typical of
auxiliaries). One possibility is treating by formally as a “weak head”. This is a notion
introduced by Tseng (2002) as an extension of the analysis of “marker” elements in standard
HPSG. Weak heads satisfy the basic lexical description in (25a) and give rise to phrasal
structures like (25b):
(25) a. weak head (definition)
b. weak head projection
A weak head identifies its HEAD value (essentially encoding information about categorial
identity) with that of its main complement. As a result, the projection of the weak head looks
very much like a projection of this complement, but with additional constraints imposed by
the weak head. We propose the following lexical entry for the Russian conditional element
by:
(26) Russian conditional by (weak head analysis)
According to this description, by inherits the valence requirements of its l-form complement
(without putting any constraints on its degree of saturation, or “bar level”), and it introduces
the appropriate grammatical marking. It is important to understand that even though by
inherits the verbal HEAD value of its complement, it is not itself a verb: we assume that the
entire lexical entry is of type invariant-word, incompatible with the type verb-word.
Processes that target verb-words (e.g., morphological operations like inflection and
prefixation of negative ne) therefore cannot apply to by.
All of these aspects of the analysis could in fact be expressed just as well using the original
HPSG marking apparatus. But the weak head approach makes it possible additionally for by
to contribute semantic information, as indicated informally in (26). Moreover, given the
cross-linguistic and historical perspective that we adopt in this paper, treating Russian by as a
head allows us to capture more faithfully its relationship to the corresponding auxiliary
elements in the other Slavic languages. And finally, the weak head analysis presents a purely
technical advantage: it allows us once again to maintain the “pan-Slavic” l-form, with a non-
empty AGR-TRIG specification. Given the formulation of the propagation constraint in (7), this
agreement requirement is only active within the projection of the l-form, and becomes inert
when another syntactic head takes over (as in all of the conditional constructions analyzed in
this paper).
6. Concluding remarks
The past tense and the conditional mood in Common Slavic shared a number of important
properties (an inflected form of BE, present in all persons and numbers, in combination with
an l-form projection) suggesting that they could both be analyzed as ordinary auxiliary
constructions. We have seen in this paper how much the two constructions now differ, within
each of the languages considered, and across the languages. Given this diversity of properties,
a uniform treatment is unattainable, but by following a comparative approach we have been
able to incorporate many common elements into our proposals for each construction in each
language. The conditional construction in particular can be treated very similarly in Polish,
Czech, and Serbo-Croatian; the Russian conditional exhibits a more advanced degree of
grammaticalization, leading us to consider a rather different approach (with nevertheless
some common aspects). The diverse manifestations of the past tense, on the other hand,
present a greater challenge. One significant result is that the l-form can be given exactly the
same formal treatment in every construction where it appears.2
Throughout this paper we have focused our attention on “snapshots” of constructions that are
quite obviously still evolving (with gaps appearing in paradigms, and speakers showing
variation and hesitation with certain examples). We would like to conclude this discussion
with a preliminary proposal for using our cross-linguistic approach to model the transition
from one stage of grammaticalization to the next. If we are faced at one stage (e.g., Common
Slavic) with a compound past tense, where the auxiliary determines the construction of the
clause, and at a later stage (e.g., Russian) with a simple past tense, where the l-form must be
responsible, then there must be an intermediate period during which both elements are
capable of fulfilling this function. And during this period, two analyses should be available
for the construction; this is the essence of the model of language change by reanalysis.
To illustrate this idea, we will take the past tense in Serbo-Croatian as an example of such a
transitional structure. Consider the clause dok sam spavao ‘as I was sleeping’. The
combination sam spavao can be assigned either an auxiliary analysis or an analysis in terms
of agreement marking:
Kupść & Tseng (2005) consider two additional constructions involving the l-form in Polish
(the compound future tense and clauses introduced by the inflected complementizer żeby).
The same l-form is also assumed in these analysis of these cases, which can be directly
adapted for the corresponding structures in the other Slavic languages.
2
(27) a. auxiliary analysis
b. agreement marking analysis
In (27a) the auxiliary selects the l-form as its complement, and it provides the past tense
semantics. In (27b) the direction of selection is reversed: the ARG-TRIG specification on the lform triggers the appearance of sam, and past tense meaning is activated when the agreement
is verified. We can imagine that both analyses coexist for some time, making a gradual shift
towards the innovative structure possible. The auxiliary loses more and more of its lexical
autonomy (becoming a clitic, undergoing phonological reduction, eventually losing syntactic
identity altogether to become an affix) to a point where it can no longer function as the
syntactic head of the construction. But in the meantime the l-form has acquired properties that
allow it to take over this function, to select the element that was formerly its selector.
As the change takes hold, subsequent developments can give rise to overt indications of the
reanalysis. For example, it is likely that at the beginning, all l-forms triggered an agreement
requirement (by introducing the index of their subject on ARG-TRIG). But in our analysis of
Polish and Czech, only 1st and 2nd person indices appear on ARG-TRIG. At some point, 3rd
person l-forms lost their non-empty ARG-TRIG specification, and 3rd person agreement
markings disappeared from the past tense construction. We would like to suggest that exactly
the same changes are currently taking place in Serbo-Croatian. Examples like (20b) could be
the result of a reanalysis of the auxiliary construction as an agreement marking construction,
along with loss of the ARG-TRIG requirement in certain cases involving 3sg subjects.
The precise mechanisms behind these changes and the complex factors that determine why
different languages take different paths at different speeds must be left as questions for further
empirical and historical work. It is interesting, for example, that the 3sg auxiliary forms are at
the same time the most robust (supplanting the 3pl form in the conditional, or serving as the
basis for paradigm regularization) and the first to disappear in past tense constructions
(except, notably, in Russian). We hope to have provided a sound basis and a set of analytical
tools for future research in this area of formal comparative linguistics.
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