Personal Pronouns in Grammars of the Second Half of the 18th – Early 19th Centuries and the Anthropocentricity of the Russian Language

The article establishes the features of compatibility of personal pronouns and evaluative vocabulary in the Russian language of the second half of the 18th – early 19th centuries on the basis of material from Russian-language grammar books. Commenting on Mikhail Lomonosov’s Russian Grammar, Alexander Sumarokov noted an interesting feature concerning the illustration of the use of personal pronouns in this grammar book: the examples Lomonosov gives indicate positive qualities of the speaker (1st person) and negative characteristics of other people (2nd and 3rd persons). The present study has established that this feature is also characteristic of other grammars of the Russian language written after the publication of the Lomonosov’s work. Basing on an analysis of examples provided in different grammar books, the author of the article classified the constructions in which positive and negative qualities of the persons mentioned depend on their relationship to other participants in the situation or without regard to them, are expressed verbally, including with the help of performatives, or derived as implicatures. It is suggested that the established pattern is objective in nature, it reflects one of the norms of using the Russian language connected with its anthropocentricity: in most cases, the speaker strives to give a positive assessment of himself and is critical of the qualities of others. The study has discovered that the restriction on the compatibility of first-person pronouns, noted by linguists of the 20th-21st centuries, consisting in the impossibility of using them with lexemes whose negative meaning is connotative, is confirmed by examples from grammars of the second half of the 18th – early 19th centuries, and thus it is traditional in nature.