Alla Nedashkivska Adams, University of Toronto
(Note: -X stands for -zero; pine fonts did not allow me to have zero sign)
The phenomenon of an animate accusative case marking for masculine inanimate nouns instead of the 'standard' -X morpheme, which syncretizes inanimates with masculine animate nouns, is extremely common in both spoken and written contemporary Ukrainian; however, has not found an adequate grammatical account in Ukrainian linguistics. Most standard formal descriptions of Ukrainian only briefly admit the presence of 'variation' in accusative forms for masculine inanimates such as napysaty lyst-X and napysaty lyst-a 'to write a letter'. Statements regarding the existence of parallel forms, however, seem more conjectural than analytical and they do not answer, but rather raise, the questions as to when, why, and where a masculine inanimate noun is marked with -a and not -X morpheme.
This paper first presents a short overview of previous hypotheses--regarding the use of -a accusative marker for masculine inanimates in Polish and Ukrainian scholarship (Ukrainian shares the phenomenon of -a accusative with Polish, Slovak, Belarusian and Upper Lusatian). It then advocates the hypothesis that the choice of -a marking is connected with Transitivity, discourse and pragmatic factors. The analysis demonstrates that marking depends on the level of utterance Transitivity, which is determined on the basis of object individuation and affectedness, punctuality, volitionality, and the number of participants in the event. In addition, it shows that the level of Transitivity is manifested morphosyntactically and signaled by the -X or by -a accusative ending on the object indicating low or high degree respectively. Pragmatic and discourse factors are analyzed within the proposed Prototypical Discourse Situation Model, which is based on the theoretical premises of Yokoyama's (1986) Transactional Discourse Model and Zaitseva's Theory of Utterance (1994, 1995). This model demonstrates that the choice of case marking adheres strongly to the following pragmatic factors: the Prototypical Discourse Situation and speaker's conceptualization of the event, the knowledge of both the speaker and the hearer of the situation and linguistic code, and the status of shared knowledge. Discourse notions which are shown to be crucial for object marking include discourse structure and the speaker's organization of discourse, the topic of discourse and discourse frame, as well as discourse saliency assigned by the speaker to a particular construction.
The data for this study is based primarily on examples from contemporary (1990-1998) Ukrainian literature. Authors were chosen to represent various areas of Ukrainian in order to demonstrate that the phenomenon of -a accusative is not merely a dialectal characteristic. The present paper argues against 'variation' or 'parallelism' in Ukrainian object marking. It constitutes a contribution to the problem of the ramifications of Transitivity, pragmatics, and discourse for case marking.
Bibliography
Yokoyama, Olga T. 1986. Discourse and Word Order. (Pragmatics and Beyond Companion series 6). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Zaitseva, V. 1994. "The Metaphoric Nature of Coding: Toward a Theory of Utterance." Journal of Pragmatics (22): 103-126.
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