The Vocative Case in Ukrainian

[J Ian Press]

Regarding Stepan Bobyk's musings about the positioning of the vocative in
Ukrainian paradigms, the placement in the book by Stefan Pugh and me as
No.7 was on the strong recommendation, even insistence, of native Ukrainian
specialists based in various parts of Ukraine. I have nothing against that
at all, given that the vocative is not really a case (though you could
still say it's a case form), and indeed in Ukrainian is most often referred
to as the 'klychna forma' (so Ukrainian uses 'forma', and the whole
discussion gets boring!). My personal preference regarding the cases (not
just in Ukrainian) is NAGDIL -- if I were to include the Vocative, I would
place it between the N and the A; and all this simply because it makes, in
my view, for an ordering which brings out a maximum of
similarities/identities between the case 'forms'.

But it would still be quite interesting to investigate the motivations,
linguistic and non-linguistic, behind various orderings.

Ian Press

J. Ian Press,
Established Professor in Russian (Comparative Linguistics),
Department of Russian, School of Modern Languages,
St Salvator's College,
University of St Andrews,
St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL, Scotland, UK.
Direct line: +44 3334 46 3631.
Email: jip at st-and.ac.uk
Department: +44 1334 46 2949; Fax: +44 1334 46 2959.
(Departmental e-mail: russian at st-and.ac.uk)