Differential Object Marking beyond animacy in Polish, Belarusian and Ukrainian: an areal phenomenon with divergent details

Ruprecht von Waldenfels

Friedrich Schiller University Jena

 

 

In Ukrainian and Polish, animate masculine nouns take the genitive ending for the (otherwise zero-marked) accusative. This pattern, inherited from Common Slavic, has expanded in both Polish and Ukrainian to encompass non-animate nouns. In the talk, I report on ongoing work concerned with comparing the shape and historical spread of this phenomenon in the two standard languages. Research into the Ukrainian situation is based on GRAC a new, geographically tagged corpus of standard Ukrainian I am developing with colleagues in Ukraine and the US (uacorpus.org).