Space in Diachrony

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 th