В. Б. Крысько

This is a good book. One of the few monographs out there dedicated to this problem, and definitely the prime candidate for a successor to Belić's "O dvojini u slovenskim jezicima."

Zholobov and Krys'ko basically set out to argue that the dual disappeared relatively late in East Slavic - around the 13th-14th centuries, in contrast to others who have argued that the dual was no longer a living category in East Slavic at the time that the East Slavs gained literacy.

The authors' argumentation is by and large impressive and convincing. First, they argue that the function of the dual in Early East Slavic is more specialized and subtle than how certain scholars have analyzed it. A beautiful example is given in which people hold swords in their hands-plural while they hold oars in their hands-dual, because it takes one hand to hold a sword and two hands to hold an oar. Second, they argue that the dual undergoes morphological and morphosyntactic innovations that are occuring over this period in East Slavic (i.e., animacy and the spread of the a-stem plural desinences), and that this proves that they existed in a meaningful way.

Less convincing, though, are some sections in which the authors suggest that religious ideology plays a significant role in the question of whether grammatical categories are preserved in a language. The suggestion is that since the Slavs preserved the IE pagan ideology, which included the "cult of the twins," for so long, they also preserved the dual for so long. To say the least, this line of argumentation is much less than convincing, but it doesn't seriously mar an otherwise good work.

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