The Verbs Imati (to Have) and Brati (to Take): Distribution and Competition in the History of Russian

The paper examines the semantic evolution of the verbs imati and brati in the 11th – 17th century Russian writing. The research is based on the data from Old and Middle Russian subcorpora of the Russian National Corpus. It is argued that the verb imati gradually lost its iterative semantics and its correlation with the verb yati and claimed the role of an aspectual pair of the verb vzyati. The verb vzimati did not compete for performing the function of an aspectual pair of the verb vzyati, since it occurred very rarely writings and belonged to the high code of written records. In the 15th – 17th centuries, the verb brati was gradually expanding its semantics, compatibility and, as a consequence, increased in frequency and acquired the properties of the verb imati by the 17th century. In the Old Ukrainian language, the verb brati occupied the niche of the verb of contact imati already in the 14th – 15th centuries. In Middle Russian, the original paradigm of imati (emlyu) was preserved, which prevented the attraction between imati and imeti and delayed the semantic convergence of imati and brati, supported by the influence of Southwestern Rus in the 16th – 17th centuries. The marginalization of the verbs imati and yati and the final formation of the aspectual pair brati – vzyati occurred in the history of the Russian language no earlier than the 18th century.