Clitics in the Old Russian space. Following Andrej A. Zaliznjak's book "Old Russian Enclitics" (2008)

A review article with a discussion of Andrej A.  Zaliznjak's book 'Old Russian Enclitics' (Moscow: LRC, 2008).

Comments. 

The reviewed book of the great Russian linguist Andrej A. Zaliznjak (1935 - 2017) is his last contribution to the syntax of Old Russian clitics. It develops the findings outlined in his seminal work Zaliznjak 1993, where Zaliznjak proved that vernacular Old Russian had Wackernagel's law in its most consistent form and proposed an account of rhythmical-syntactic barriers, i. e. context-bound factors changing the surface positions of Wackernagel's clitics. 

On unclear reasons, Zaliznjak's 1993 discovery of Wackernagel's law in Russian attracted less attention from syntacticians than his 2008 book, where he compares the vernacular Old Russian clitic system with the clitic syntax in the Bookish Old Russian texts and argues that the bookish Old Russian system could be derived from the vernacular system but not vice versa. 

Zaliznjak's description is in some aspects close to the so-called prosodic approach advocated by Halpern 1996 and other scholars. He also argued for multidimensional classifications of clitics. As an experienced accentologist, Zaliznjak knew that the class of clitics can be modeled differently if one sticks to phonetic (prosodic) vs syntactic criteria. Some other scholars, incl. Klavans (1985), Sadock (1989), Aikhenvald (2002), and the reviewer (2002) developed similar intuitions. However, Zaliznjak's own treatment of his innovative research tool, the barrier theory, is somewhat limited since he tries to explain late clitic placement (CL > 2 orders) solely by (sentence) prosody and does not take into account syntactic factors.

In this review, I cite the first publication of Zaliznjak's book 'Slovo o Polku Igoreve. Vzgljad lingvista' (2004). Those who are accustomed to later revised editons (2007, 2008) should not think it is a typo or mistake.

The research context of this book and this review is commented upon here:  https://zenodo.org/records/15116136