Genitive Case Singular Forms of the 3rd Person Feminine Pronoun in the Russian Literary Language of the 18th–19th Centuries and Modern Russian Dialects

The article examines the use of genitive singular feminine forms neyo (‘her’) and ney (‘her’) in the works of Russian writers of the second half of the 18th–19th centuries and in modern Russian dialects. First of all, the mechanism of the emergence in the history of the Russian language of the genitive form yey / ney, different from the accusative form yeyo / neyo, is described. The main material of the study is prose texts collected in the National Corpus of the Russian Language (ruscorpora.ru). In the middle – second half of the 18th century, the form ney was acceptable in literary language, and different authors had different preferences regarding it. The connection of this form with certain prepositions has not yet appeared. Writers born in the late 18th – first third of the 19th century used the form ney quite actively, but it was mainly used only (or almost only) with the preposition u. At the same time, most authors preferred the combination u ney to the combination u neyo. We see the highest percentage of use of the form ney in the works of Ivan Goncharov, Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoevsky. In the language of writers born in the third quarter of the 19th century, the use of the form ney, including its use with the preposition u, is generally reduced to a minimum, and subsequently it disappears from the literary language. But in modern dialects, the genitive form ney in combination with the preposition u is extremely widespread. Apparently, the widespread use of the combination u ney arose as a result of the fact that the set of meanings characteristic of the genitive case with the preposition u at some point began to be also marked by a special form ney. The same tendency was also present in the literary language, mainly in the first half of the 19th century.

genitive case, 3rd person feminine pronoun, Russian literary language of the 18th–19th centuries, Russian dialects