A Note on the Underlying Shape of Present-Tense Morphemes in East Slavic

Abstract

In the one-stem theory of the Russian verb (Jakobson 1948), which has subsequently been generalized to apply to all East Slavic languages, the present-tense morphemes are broken into two components: a present-tense marker and a person/number marker.

Evidence derived from the development of these morphemes in Byelorussian dialects, however, suggests that native speakers of these dialects treat them as single units, a fact which has broad implications for determining the procedures by means of which morphemes are isolated in a linguistic analysis.