Функционирование деепричастий в русском языке XVIII в.: к вопросу об эволюции их грамматического значения

The paper analyzes the functioning of gerunds in the Russian language of the XVIII^th c. It describes and classifies contexts that are non-standard from the perspective of modern grammatical norms. By analyzing material from the XVIII^th c. in a diachronic perspective and comparing it with Old and Middle Russian material, we revise the traditional understanding of the evolution of participles in the history of Russian and clarify the stages of development of the grammatical meaning of the modern gerund. The modern grammatical meaning and syntactic behavior of gerunds began to take shape in the XVIII^th c. It is the material of this time period that demonstrates contexts that were absent in previous centuries, allowing us to trace the process of grammaticalization of the gerund.

In the first stage, participial predication becomes dependent in meaning but remains formally independent and is connected with the main predication in meaning by a coordinating conjunction. In the second stage, semantic dependence begins to be explicitly expressed: the coordinating conjunction is replaced by the subordinating conjunction to. Finally, formal indicators of the dependency of the participial clause become unnecessary, as the gerund now acquires a grammatical meaning of the verbal adjunct.