Linear position and prosodic status of addressive forms in Old Russian: data from the Lay of the Host of Igor

The article examines the previously unnoticed issue regarding the rules of arrangement of addressive forms in the Old Russian monument of the late 12th century The Lay of the Host of Igor. It is shown that while multi-word addresses clearly gravitate toward being placed at the absolute beginning of a sentence, single-word addresses, by contrast, cannot occupy the initial position at all and in the overwhelming majority of cases are located at the end of the first bar group, thus obeying Wackernagel's law for phrasal enclitics. This observation allows us to look at some controversial and even «dark» passages in The Lay in a slightly different way than it is usually done now – in particular, for the segment Kaja rany doroga bratije it seems reasonable to return to the conjecture of N. S. Tikhonravov (brat<a> instead of bratije). The issue of the prosodic status of the imperfect forms of the verb byti ‘to be’ is also discussed: the available material indicates that in the language of The Lay these forms are also subject to
Wackernagel's law. Thus, although in the famous opening phrase of The Lay the address bratije is in the sixth (!) place from the beginning (Ne lěpo li ny b’ašetъ, bratije), such a position is the only possible one, taking into account the rules of word order in the text of the monument.