The etiquette of aspect. How and why prositi stopped worrying and entered a pair

Abstract – On the basis of the linguistic and extralinguistic data gathered from a variety of Old Russian (henceforth OR) and Middle Russian (henceforth MR) written sources (the Laurentian Codex of the Tale of Bygone Years, the corpus of birch bark letters, Daniel the Traveller’s Pilgrimage, Afanasij Nikitin’s The Journey Beyond Three Seas, testaments and treaties signed between princes, Avvakum’s Life, and other texts retrieved from the OR and MR subcorpora of the Russian National Corpus), this paper explores the possible reasons for the absence of preverbed proto-perfective first person non-past forms of prositi ‘to ask (for)’ in directive speech acts up to the second half the 18th century. It is argued that this restriction can be primarily accounted for on the basis of morphosyntactic and sociolinguistic evidence, namely, on the one hand, the actional properties of verbs of communication and, on the other, the lack of a proper allocutionary pronoun (in the sense of a T-V distinction) consistent with the etiquette of hierarchically-oriented social relationships