The Route Instrumental: A Historical Perspective, On the Use of Bare Instrumental of Space in Eighteenth-Century Russian

摘要

This article deals with the use of the bare Instrumental case as a means of expressing spatialsemantics in Russian literary sources from the eighteenth century. In modern Russian, thefunction of such Instrumental is somewhat limited to expressing a route or, rather, a physicalsetting through which a trajectory of motion lies. In the meantime, analysis of case usage inworks written during the period of transition from Middle Russian to the modern literarylanguage makes it possible to determine those spheres in which the bare Instrumentalregularly appeared but has since grown obsolete. Major differences with the present-daysituation are revealed, while the numbers demonstrate which uses of the bare Instrumental ofspace remained a language norm in the 1700s and also which competing case forms providefor syntactic variation.