Pronominal adverb nekogda in Russian texts of the 17th–18th centuries (a study based on the Russian National Corpus and dictionaries)

Abstract

This article is based on data from the Russian National Corpus (RNC) on the use of the pronominal adverb nekogda (at one time) in Russian texts dating to 17th–18th centuries, which has not received much attention from researchers and thus remains an interesting open question. During the period under study, nekogda conveyed both negative and indefinite meanings. As an indefinite pronominal adverb, nekogda, unlike its modern counterpart, had a broad range of context-specific meanings: ‘kogda-to’ (someday), ‘kogda-nibud’ (once), ‘inogda’ (occasionally), ‘odnazhdy’ (one day), ‘kak-to’ (at one point), and ‘kak-to raz’ (on one occasion). According to the Dictionary of the Russian Language of the 11th–17th Centuries, the negative nekogda was synonymous with the pronominal adverb nikogda (under no circumstances), but was not used as a predicative pronominal adverb forming the Pron_neg Inf sentence structure with the infinitive. However, the evidence from the RNC suggests that the negative nekogda in the analyzed Russian texts of the 17th–18th centuries occurred only in predicative use and meant ‘net vremeni’ (there is no time), with only a single instance found in the texts of the 17th century. The findings allow for an assumption that nekogda in the meaning of ‘nikogda’ (under no circumstances) recorded in the Dictionary of the Russian Language of the 11th–17th Centuries is a spelling variant of the negative pronominal adverb nikogda, not a separate word.