Verbs denoting 'to give' have developed grammatical meanings in many languages of the world. The present study analyses the grammaticalization of give in causative and modal constructions in the closely related Slavic languages Russian, Polish and Czech.
Adopting a corpus driven approach, it takes departure from a detailed analysis of the use of these constructions in large reference corpora. This synchronic approach is supplemented by an analysis of the use of these constructions in Old Church Slavonic and by diachronic corpus-based accounts of the developments in Czech and Polish....