Global and local grammaticalization The emergence of the nominative object construction

The origin of the nominative object construction, which occur most often with independent infinitves, in North Russian dialects has been intensively investigated, often related with neighboring Baltic and Finnic languages (cf. Filin 1969, Kiparsky 1969, Timberlake 1974, Ambrazas 2001). There are three crucial questions to be addressed; (a) the apparent form-function mismatch, i.e., the nominative case for an object, (b) word order, i.e., a noun fol-lowed by an infinitive in neutral order, and (c) modal meaning, i.e., deontic semantics in the apparent absence of modal verbs. It is proposed here that the nominative object construction started out as an existential construction, whose skeletal structure would be BE – Nounnom – Noundat (2-I). This assump-tion obviates the need to devise ad-hoc hypotheses to account for the problems (a) and (b). Crucial to the first stage is that paxatei (which would become an infinitive in a later develop-ment) is not a verbal, but a nominal category. The existential verb esti and the purposive da-tive paxatei combined produce the modal (deontic) semantics, ‘there is a piece of land to plow ’> ‘It is necessary to plow the land’, and this development (existence/possession> deon-tic) is cross-linguistically very common (‘global grammaticalization’, cf. van der Auwera et al 2007; Bhatt 1998). The second stage (2-II) is characterized by the category change of paxatei. The dativ