Imperative budi in the XVth century texts: towards the problem of the development of indefinite pronouns with the component–nibud’ in Russian

The article deals with an analysis of semantic and syntactic peculiarities of the imperative буди in 15th century official documents from Moscow, Novgorod and Pskov, and in The Third Pskov Chronicle. The author makes an attempt to delineate the probable paths of grammaticalization of буди in the “pronoun + ни + буди” structure, from which indefinite pronouns with the -нибудь suffix have subsequently developed. Differences in the semantics and frequency of these structures in texts from different dialect areas (central and northwestern) allow us to hypothesize that the morphologization of буди initially arose in the central dialect area.