The paper analyses the different ways, lexical information can be positioned relative to the two parts of the Old Church Slavonic periphrastic perfect tense, formed by auxiliary быти + l-participle. We find that positioning of information before or behind the construction is most open to rhetoric-stylistic shaping of the utterances in a given context. Positioning of information within the periphrastic construction leads to focus steering; insertion of information of different kind into the periphrastic construction can be interpreted not so much as focus steering towards rhematic, but towards emphasized information. Complex forms of information positioning are a sign of written conceptuality.