Archaic forms of the linking verb to be in the poetic speech of the XVIII century: grammatical and stylistic characteristics

The paper uses M. I. Pigin’s linguistic works to investigate the intermediate position of the syncretic constructions with the verb to be in the eighteenth-century poetic texts. The author analyzes the gradual loss of abstract copulas and existential verbs in different genres. The obtained data are compared with the materials of the eighteenth-century grammatical treatises and the twentieth-century works on the history of Russian syntax. Based on the texts from the Russian National Corpus, the archaic forms есмь (esm’), еси (esi) and есте (este) are studied and the frequency of their corresponding forms in poetic texts is analyzed. The analysis of the Baroque and Classicism poetic contexts, as well as the data of the The Syntactic Dictionary of Russian Poetry of the XVIII Century confirms the tendencies associated with the reduced usage of these forms. The author points to the actualization of linking verbs in the present tense in so-called “high” genres, the use of copulas for the purpose of folklore stylization, and a general tendency to reduce the number of the archaic connective forms in the Pushkin era.