Russian ‘Spontaneous Inceptive’ Constructions with Partial Grammaticalization of the Verb Pojti: Towards an Analysis of History and Structure
Abstract
The paper investigates the Russian construction of ‘spontaneous inceptive’ consisting of the perfective motion verb pojti and a dependent infinitive (e.g., pošël krošit'), which emerged at the beginning of the 19th century. The construction conveys the sudden, uncontrolled, and increasingly intense onset of a repetitive (multiplicative) action. Formally, it features emphatic prosody on pojti alongside strict grammatical constraints (a strong preference for finite third-person past-tense forms) and lexical restrictions (incompatibility with homogeneous processes or non-iterative verbs, except for ‘bleached’ predicates like česat'). The study also examines the impersonal variant i pošlo-poechalo and the peculiar feminine form pošla pisat', demonstrating that the latter originates in early 19th-century poetic usage (P. A. Vjazemskij) rather than Gogol's Dead Souls. Finally, recent marginal extensions to non-multiplicative contexts are discussed.
Submitted: June 11, 2026 | Accepted: July 23, 2026 | Published Oct. 14, 2026 | Language: ru
Keywords Multiplicative action • Spontaneous inceptive • Historical syntax • Motion verbs • Russian aspectology
Copyright © 2026 Vladimir Plungian, Ekaterina Rakhilina. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/BES/2785-3187/2026/01/005