The Vocative Case in Ukrainian

[Robert De Lossa]

With regard to the vocative, a number of placements are possible, but I
think most Ukrainian sources now will have it at the seventh position.
Officially, it was referred to as a "form" (klychna forma), but my sources
at the Institute of the Ukrainian Language at the National Academy of
Sciences of Ukraine have told me that the official position now is that it
is a "case" (klychnyj vidminok). But the question of where to put it really
begs the question of why you want to put it somewhere. For teaching
anglophone students Ukrainian, it really makes sense to put it at the
second position and teach it in that order--this is natural for classroom
communication (in an immersion setting you'd actually get it first--"Dobryj
den' pane Bohdane..." etc.) and easiest on the students since for the
russophones (the majority of non-Slavic students in our classrooms), it
tells them that there is something radically different about Ukrainian (at
least those not sophisticated enough to know about zero-ending vocative for
-a stem animates in Russian) and for those with no experience with a
declined language it gives them the idea of declension in a maximally
constrained syntactic environment. This is what we've done in our textbook
(see below). If you are worrying about where to put it to be "Ukrainian,"
then I'd go with the seventh position. A good resource for these sorts of
problems is the journal "Dyvoslovo" out of Kiev (formerly "Ukrajins'ka mova
j literatura v shkoli"), where a lot of these pedagogical issues are
hammered out for internal Ukrainian usage.

Cheers, Rob De Lossa

And now, the shameless plug for our book (still in manuscript form, but
currently in use at a number of universities): Robert De Lossa, R. Robert
Koropeckyj, Robert Romanchuk. _Mova v majbutnje: A Ukrainian Course for
American Students_. And also: Alexandra Isaievych. _Topical Lessons for
Mova v majbutnje_. The final version (daj Bozhe, ready this fall) will have
the exercises separated out and full tapes (thus, four parts, text, topical
lessons, exercises, tapes). The text proper has polylogs for each lesson,
and more ancillary stuff than has been provided in a college textbook to
date; part of each text chapter is devoted especially to students who have
had Russian previously (although this is *not* a "Ukrainian through
Russian" approach; still, we recognize that more and more of our
Ukrainian-language students are Americans with previous Russian-language
experience). The textbook currently is being used for the first two to
three semesters (depending on tempo) of instruction (i.e., for elementary
and initial intermediate use). Usage norms, review standards, pedagogical
outlook, etc. are discussed in the preface.

____________________________________________________
From:
Robert De Lossa
Managing Editor, Harvard Series/Papers in Ukrainian Studies
Publications Office
Ukrainian Research Institute
Harvard University
1583 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
617-496-8768 tel. 617-495-8097 fax.
"rdelossa at fas.harvard.edu"