Prepositions and prepositional phrases in the development of simple sentence (in Old Russian birchbark documents of the 11th-15th centuries)
The study concerns the evolution of syntactic roles of prepositional phrases in Old Russian birchbark documents as applied to the develop- ment of simple sentence structure. The author makes an attempt to tackle the derivation of prepositional phrases within the sentence, its reasons and stages pertaining to the change of syntactic paradigms: parataxis and hy- potaxis. The data analyzed make it possible to draw a general conclusion that in the majority of cases a prepositional phrase expressed an addi- tional proposition which was superimposed on the main proposition.