2026/07/03 by Tetiana Vysotska · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Linguistics and language evolution #Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity #Ukrainian Cultural and Linguistic Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.37708/ezs.swu.bg.v24i2.1
openalex publication_date 2026/07/03 · openalex created_date 2026/07/08 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
The paper provides an overview of flections of nouns of three genders in a prepositional case-based compounds “в+nounLoc.Sing” where the preposition indicates the location of objects and a noun carries a locative seme, i.e. is a spatial reference. The aim of the study is to analyze variant forms of nouns of all three genders in the locative case singular. In this research, morphological variation is understood as the existence of different case forms of the same linguistic unit while preserving the meaning of the same word. Variant noun forms, particularly in the locative case singular, were identified in sentences drawn from texts of various genres and styles dating from the Middle Ukrainian period of the 16th–17th centuries. Based on the analysis of a wide range of empirical material, the study records and traces the functioning of noun inflections in the analyzed grammatical form, demonstrating coexistence ranging from two to four variant endings in masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns. It has been established that the variability of noun endings could occur both within a single word and at the level of a single document. Overall, the study arrives at the following conclusions: variation in noun case forms is determined by a number of linguistic and extralinguistic factors, including the assimilation of certain grammatical forms to others through grammatical analogy, the dialect of the scribe and the place where the text was written, as well as the linguistic practices of the period. In conclusion, the article shows that efforts to standardize the system of inflections eventually led to the displacement of some endings and the stabilization of others, a process reflected in the modern standard Ukrainian literary language. Notably, some variant endings, although not codified as normative in the literary language, continued to function primarily in territorial dialects. Further research requires a more detailed examination of a larger corpus of texts written in different dialectal areas, which would make it possible to trace the development of the morphological system in general and noun inflection in particular in the Ukrainian language of the period under analysis.