The Particle -KA. Meaning. Grammar. Etymology [Частица КА. Значение. Грамматика. Этимология]

This is a revised and extended presentation of my invited talk given at the Dialectological Circle in Moscow 22 May, 2025. I address the meaning and grammar of the Russian particle -KA (-KO) and partly its etymology and areal contacts in the Circum-Baltic area.  I consider three types of sources: 1) Russian texts of the XIX - XXI centuries; 2) Russian dialects, with focus on the mini-corpora of 9 Northern Russian dialects and the Dialectal Subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus (RNC); 3) the correspondences to Russian clauses with -KA in the parallel Russian-Vepsian and Russian-Karelian corpora. The general meaning conveyed by the particle -KA in Modern Standard Russian can be classified as a 'weak imperative meaning', i.e. the meaning of the non-categorical order, where the speaker acknowledges the possibility that her order to commit p won't be realized. This sort of meaning is covered by the use of morphologically marked imperative forms, but is distinct from the meaning of imperative proper, i.e. the meaning of a categorical order or instruction, and has some features in common with optative and emphatic indicative constructions. Basing on the ideas advanced earlier by Kobozeva (1990), Levontina (1991, 2019) and Krylova (2024, 2025), I offer a definition of the weak imperative meaning and argue that in the case of the Slavic particle -KA, Indo-European -*KO (N), it evolved from the meaning of proximal deixis still retained by part of the uses of –KA in earlier Russian and in the Russian dialects. Vahros's hypothesis (1984) that the weak imperative particle (T)-KO and the dectic particle -KA are genetically different elements is not true to fact since Old Russian birch bark letters from the XII already show both the weak imperative and the deictic uses of the particle, which is invariably spelled as -КА. Moreover, Vahros's conjecture that Northern Russian variant -KO invariably correlates with the (weak) imperative meaning, while the variant -KA invariably correlates with the non-imperative meaning finds no support in the dialectal corpora. The parallel Vepsian and Karelian corpora add an important areal perspective. The weak imperative meaning of Russian -КА clauses is normally not rendered by bare imperative forms. Vepsian has a default weak imperative marker ― the suffix (or frozen enclitic particle) –ske(p)/-ške(b)/-šek and several less frequent markers including the particle -ko borrowed from Russian, while Karelian mostly applies a strategy with an added postpositive particle but lacks a single generalized weak imperative marker.  Both languages license the double marking strategy, where the main weak imperative marker combines with an added deictic or emphatic element. The reanalysis of the particle -KA in standard Russian as a weak imperative suffix (Pertsov 1996) is possible but not forced since colloquial Russian still exhibits some variation in the placement of -KA. In particular, Pekunova's test (p. c.) on the locus of -KA in the complex imperatives like IMP1 (KA) IMP (KA) indicates that -KA should be analyzed as an enclitic attached to clausal left periphery rather than a verbal affix.  

Comments and clarifications.

1. This presentation develops and continues Zimmerling (2025) but is a new study of its own and has three times as many slides.
2. Despite the object of this study are the non-categorical uses of the imperative, some formulations of mine are made more categorical.  
3. The list of references is arranged alphabetically in the attached file but not in the 'References' section on this website.