One or several categories? The Old Church Slavonic nǫ-verbs and linguistic profilingОдна категория или несколько? Старославянские глаголы на -nǫ и лингвистическое профилирование

In this article, I will investigate the Old Church Slavonic verbs with the -nǫ suffix, both the verbs that keep the nasal suffix throughout the paradigm (e.g. plinǫti ‘spit’) and the verbs that display -Ø in the past tense (e.g. pogybnǫti ‘perish’). Do these verbs constitute one or more linguistic categories? Having compiled a complete database of relevant verbs in Old Church Slavonic, I will argue for a compromise, according to which all nǫ-verbs belong to the same category network, but display different centers of gravity (prototypes) within this network. The network hypothesis is corroborated by detailed statistical analysis (called ‘linguistic profiling’), which takes both semantic as well as formal properties of the verbs in question into account.