On reflexes of the Injunctive in Old Russian literary sources

One of the important features of the Old Russian written sources is variability of the third person singular and plural endings in the Present-Future tense with and without -ть (of the type гаснеть ~ гасне, суть ~ су). It may be explained as the inheritance of Indo-European ti- and t-forms related to the opposition of the Indicative and the Injunctive. At the same time the Slavonic Present Indicative takes the functions of the Indo-European Conjunctive. The variability cannot be explained by confusion of the primary and secondary endings because it is stable and is determined by functional parameters. It is demonstrated that the t-forms appear in Old Russian in multipredicative groups with morphologically homogeneous and functionally correlated predicates.