Prepositional phrase vs. bare instrumental
Natalia Philippova · Studies in language companion series · 2017
The trajectory of motion in Russian can be expressed by a prepositional phrase with the noun in the dative case or a bare NP in the instrumental case. It is argued that the latter construction is falling into disuse, along with the general trend toward analyticity in Slavic languages ( Comrie et al. 1996 ). In this paper, I present a corpus-based diachronic study of the distribution of the two constructions with respect to various variables, such as noun frequency, the conceptualization of the Ground object, verb aspect, and others. I provide an argument that the bare NP construction is going through lexicalization as an adverb.