The mysteries of a Middle-Russian construction ježe god / godov / god’

This paper offers a diachronic analysis of the construction ježe + a noun denoting a temporal interval (ježe + god ‘every year’, ježe + den’ ‘every day’, etc.), a pattern attested in administrative documents of the Middle Russian period and ultimately the source of modern Russian adverbs such as ježegodno ‘annually’. On the basis of all occurrences retrieved from the corpus of texts in the written record, the first part of the paper describes the formal structure of the construction and traces its historical development. The second part situates the construction in its areal-genetic and typological setting and compares it with functionally similar patterns elsewhere in Slavic and beyond. The discussion highlights several properties of the construction that are problematic for interpretation and, as one possible solution, advances the hypothesis that this construction derives from two different types of universal concessive conditionals, with nominal predication, on the one hand, and partitive, on the other