Maria Ermolova (HSE University) Gerunds in the Russian language of the 17th century: a transitional period in the history of their grammatical development

I will present the results of a corpus study on the functioning of gerunds in the Russian language of the 17th century. Comparing these findings with data from the 18th century allows tracing the stages of the evolution of the grammatical meaning of gerunds and making adjustments to existing theories. 
The situation with the use of gerunds remains relatively stable throughout the 17th century. Continuing the Old Russian tradition, gerunds can be used in the living language as finite forms for both past and present tenses. Compared to the earliest period, gerunds in the 17th century become even more similar to the -л- form, as evidenced by their use with the particle бы in the subjunctive mood, which is not documented in early texts.
The 17th century demonstrates how gerunds lost their tense meaning, acquiring a relative one depending on the tense of the main predicate, while still remaining formally autonomous predicates. The establishment of the gerund’s function as a predicate in a dependent adverbial clause occurs in the 18th century.