ИСТИНА

I render the pro and contra arguments for (against) the grammatical borrowing /innate Indo-European hypotheses concerning the origin of the enigmatic Slavic "NOMINATIVE with INFINITIVE" construction of the type ВОДА ПИТИ 'one can/should drink water'. My main arguments come from synchrony and linguistic typology. I argue that the variation ACC + INF ~ NOM +INF in the Old Russian infinitival clauses patterns with differential object marking (DOM). Similar instances of DOM are attested in a number of Fenno-Ugric languages. The grammatical borrowing hypothesis is ceteris paribus more reliable that the inner evolution hypothesis. The latter is based on the idea that the "drink (INF) water (NOM)" constructions are reanalyzed gerundive construction like "the water for drinking", "potable water": such reading find little empirical support in the Old Russian text. It is however unclear whether a number of Old Slavic idioms (i.e. North-western and Western Russian dialects) borrowed the DOM pattern directly from the neighbor Fenno-Ugric languages or via the Baltic languages which could can borrowed the same pattern.