The Vocative Case in Ukrainian

[Oscar E Swan]

I'm sure Cleminson is right about Smotryc'kyj's reasoning as to case listing.

I couldn't find the relevant Festschrift in our library, so I couldn't
check to see what van Schoonefeld has to say, but it is not correct to
say that the vocative is not a case. It functions in a paradigm
alongside other endings called case endings. That's all being a case
means at the level of listing them for study. The vocative is not a fully
"syntactic case", in that it does not have any functions which bring it
under the syntactic scope of a verb. As long as we are case-bashing, in
this sense the genitive is not much of a case either, since its main
function is to relate nouns to nouns, not nouns to verbs. Of course, the
genitive has acquired various syntactic functions such that genitive NPs
often do end up in verb-controlled positions. Recall that the
instrumental was long considered not to be a case in Russian, since it had
no Greek prototype. Perhaps we should go back to this view, the
instrumental being so problematic.

The placement of the vocative in first or second position among the seven
cases possibly reflects a judgment as to which of the two
candidates, the nominative or the vocative, is the semantically most
vacuous. Arguments could go either way. Still, it seems a poor choice to
put the vocative first, because this is not the psychologically primary
form of a word. The nominative tends to be the case used to answer the
question 'what is X in your language?' The vocative is possibly primary
for young children when referring to relatives, close friends, and family
pets.

The vocative is also logically placed next to the nominative in
that the nominative case often serves as a de facto vocative. In fact,
the nominative is used more often in a vocative function than the
vocative itself. In practice, the vocative hardly ever occurs except for
people and pets, so placement in first position in paradigms where the
form is mainly theoretical seems a dubious choice.

However, consider Slovak. In traditional Slovak grammars the vocative is
placed in fifth position, because this is what Czech does. The vocative
slot itself is left blank, because Slovak for all intents and purposes
does not have a vital vocative. Martin Votruba showed me that this is
so, otherwise I wouldn't have believed it.

The placement of the vocative in last position may reflect a (valid)
judgment that it is the least important of the cases. In Polish it is
convenient to place the vocative after the locative, in last place. I have
always assumed that this is because for
masculine nouns it has the same form as the locative. Is this then the
source of the Ukrainian tradition? (This was the original question: what
is the source of the tradition in Ukrainian.)For whatever reason, in Polish
the masculine locative and vocative cases have become associated with one
another. A colleague of mine suggests that this is because their names in
English differ by only one letter. That is good enough for me.

Many people in Russian seem to think that the cases should be listed in
an order that makes it possible to place syncretisms next to one another.
Good luck. The problem is that the syncretisms differ among the
declensional types, and are also different for nouns, adjectives, and
pronouns, not to mention that they also differ from language to language.
This makes for a pretty messy picture by the time all this gets
transferred into a synthetic chart. It's a good thing Russian doesn't
have a vocative. Who knows how our textbooks would list the cases then.

Sorry. Russian does have a vocative, at least in the first declension (or
is it the second?). Cf. Volod' from Volodja; Kol' from Kolja, and so on.
The ending is neo-zero, different from old zero in that it doesn't condition
a mobile vowel, cf. babushk, not babushek. What position in the order of
cases should it occupy? I would suggest first, since it seems to mirror the
stem of the word most directly. Russian isn't off the hook after all.

The thing I like about the Slavic cases is that the English name for each
one starts with a different letter, making reference in scholarly papers
so much easier. I propose that we list them in reverse alphabetical order:
VNLIGDA. This has the advantage of being pronounceable as a word, at
least as a Slavic word.

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Oscar E. Swan   Dept. of Slavic Languages & Literatures
1417 Cathedral of Learning   Univ. of Pittsburgh  15260
412-624-5707      swan+ at pitt.edu
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