ИСТИНА

I discuss the methodology and conclusiveness of the corpus-based historical linguistics and analyze two formal models predicting the language-internal variation in Early Old Russian syntax. Linguistic models claiming a rigid distribution of grammatical features like ± overt realization of agreement markers activate hidden corpus characteristics such as profiles of text genres, chronology, vector of change, ± impact of L2, ± presence of supra-dialect features. In this case they can be valued and checked on text samples, where genre features are stable, while location and time vary.