Reanalysis in the Russian past tense

Abstract The large majority of the Slavic languages have in historical times lost the synthetic past tenses of the aorist and the imperfect. These tenses were replaced by a new past tense based on the erstwhile perfect. This transformation created space for new ways of forming a past tense, and one of these was a novel past tense based on the past active participle, also called the gerundial past tense, a past tense found in Northwest Russia, above all in the Pskov area, cf. Pskov dialectal i jon pom'orši toper’ uže, versus Standard Russia i on teper’ uže umer, ‘and he died now already’. The point of this article is to demonstrate how the emergence of the l-participle as the general past tense opened up for a reanalysis of the past active participle as a finite past tense verb-form. The actualization process following this reanalysis is illustrated by examples from the Pskov Chronicle.