Replication data for: Old Church Slavonic byti Part One and Part Two

Abstract Part One. There is controversy over whether byti ‘be’ in Old Church Slavonic functioned as an imperfective verb with an unusually large number of inflected forms or as an aspectual pair of verbs, reflecting its suppletive origin from two stems (es- and bū-). We offer an objective empirical approach to the status of this verb, using statistical analysis of 2,428 attestations of byti in comparison with 9,694 attestations of 129 other verbs. This makes it possible to accurately locate byti in the context of the verbal lexicon of Old Church Slavonic. The comparison is made via grammatical profiles, a method that examines the frequency distribution of each verb’s inflected forms. This comparison is undertaken in two rounds, one assuming that byti is a single verb, and the other assuming that it is a pair of verbs. Both assumptions yield reasonable results, and although the grammatical profile analyses do not suffice to solve the controversy, they lay the groundwork for further analysis in Part Two that argues for a single-verb interpretation of byti. Data and R Scripts Part One: The Dat
a Our analysis uses two datasets, one that presents the forms of byti as a single paradigm, verbs.csv, and one that presents it as a pair of verbs, splitverbs.csv. The R Scripts In order to represent the Church Slavonic orthography, you will need our transliteration script: translit.r. This script is sourced by the scripts for our analysis which present byti as either a single verb or a verb pair: PartOneSingleVerb.r and PartOneVerbPair.r . This script performs all of the steps for the analysis in our article and generates the plots.