Empathy in Russian: A synchronic and diachronic perspective

This article examines the effects of empathy (or perspective) in Russian from a synchronic and diachronic point of view. I focus on the investigation of three constructions that, according to my initial hypothesis, involve conflicting empathy loci: the construction with the reflexive pronoun sebja within an infinitive clause (?Mark priglasil Anju vypit' s soboj kofe ‘Mark invited Anja to have coffee with himself’); the construction with sebja within an adjectival phrase (?Ona vsegda berëtsja za sliškom trudnye dlja sebja zadači ‘She always takes on tasks that are too difficult for herself’); and the construction involving a first-person object of the verb vstretitʹ ‘to meet’ (?Včera on slučajno vstretil menja na ulice ‘Yesterday he accidentally met me on the street’). Based on Russian National Corpus and Araneum Russicum data, I argue that 1) the conflict hypothesis is correct in relation to modern Russian; 2) the conflict can be resolved through some general (rather than construction-specific) mechanisms and under certain conditions, each of which has typological parallels; 3) the conflict was absent in the Russian language of the 19th century. Thus, modern Russian fits into cross-linguistic generalizations on empathy. Conversely, 19th-century Russian challenges the idea, expressed by some researchers, that the effect of empathy is present in all languages.