The ways to re-narrate: development of the reported speech markers in Russian
The subject of this article is lexical markers of the reported speech in the Old and modern Russian language. They are considered as a result of similar developments from specific verbal forms to damaged auxiliary items. The moments of their appearance and, to some extent, disappear-ance are also specified. The data suggest that there are parameters, which control transformation of a verbal form along the well-established gram- maticalization path (content word > grammatical word > clitic > inflec- tional affix). However, in the cases at issue the full path remains untrod- den till the last. The causes of this shortened path as well as arguments for defining a specific construction are discussed in greater detail. To sum up, a clause headed by a speech verb is syntactically reanalyzed in such a way that the head loses its functions and transforms into a grammatical word, if not to a clitic.