The preservation of Paucal: An early grammatical split in Slavic

PROTO-SLAVIC (PSL) INHERITED three number categories from Indo-European (IE): singular, plural, and dual (compare Meillet 1969:292-300, Leskien 1962:79-81, 118, and Vasilenko 1965:288-89). These categories had distinct morphology in both declension and conjugation. Matthews (1960:198) says that by the 13th century there are numerous 'mechanical slips' involving tri '3' and cetyre '4' in the documents, which show the shift of tri and cetyre into a PAUCAL(1) (from Latin paucus 'few') category with dva '2'. This is exactly the period during which the inherited dual morphology was being lost. The simultaneous loss of dual morphology and the preservation and expansion of the paucal category is a remarkable juxtaposition that requires explanation. A dual category has clear cognitive utility and plausibility. I suggest that a paucal category is also plausible, if less so than dual, and that it is cognitively useful. The expansion of the domain of dual into paucal is one indication of its plausibility and utility, and the expansion of the range of its application in Contemporary Standard Russian (CSR) is another. As Matthews notes, these expansions occurred during and in spite of the loss of dual inflectional morphology. Both expansions constitute the meat of the present study. Specifically, I show the dual morphology and paucal syntax in old Russian (OR) and their expanded applications in CSR. I discuss the cognitive plausibility of paucal and suggest the possible cognitive and grammatical reasons for the loss of the dual morphology. I then suggest the two possible ways in which a dual/paucal category could have been preserved morphologically, ways which are both cognitively and grammatically plausible. Finally, I tell how the paucal category was actually preserved and show that both cognition and linguistic structure influence the development of two Slavic language families.