The Old Church Slavic conditional in comparative syntactic perspective

The Old Church Slavic conditional appears 100 times in the Marianus codex of the Gospels. Its occurrences may be divided into contrary-to-fact conditional clauses, complement clauses indicating purpose and wish, and indirect question. Only in the first of these is it regularly employed. The conditional is a compound formation involving a unique set of forms of the verb byti ‘be’. It is characterized generally by a stem form bi-, of optative origin, together with a form bǫ of subjunctive/injunctive origin occurring only in the 3 pers. pl. This mixed paradigm appears to have been in the process of merging with that of the aorist (stem by-). The conditional is in the vast majority of instances accompanied by the perfect lparticiple, in a few cases by the past passive participle in -nŭ-, or rarely, it may stand alone. This article examines the employment of the OCS conditional relative to the means employed in the other five first-millennium-CE versions of the Gospels (the Greek original, Gothic, Classical Armenian, the Latin Vulgate, and the Anglo-Saxon Gospels) to capture the same notion. The result provides a comparative morphosyntax focusing on the expression of a subtype of the irrealis across all these languages.