Loss of the vocative case and its reflection in Old and Middle Russian monuments of business writing

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to describe the loss of the vocative case in Russian language on the material of Old and Middle Russian monuments of business writing. A study of four text corpora and quantitative analysis of the vocative forms, which has not previously been proposed, allowed us to conclude the following. The vocative case was lost in the late Old Russian period with the preservation of the forms of individual common nouns (господине ‘lord’, брате ‘brother’, княже ‘prince’, господо ‘lords’). Presumably due to the frequent use in documents of certain genres, these forms became cliched expressions. In addition, it was concluded that, for the listed lexemes, the choice of the vocative or nominative case could depend on the syntactic environment, specifically the presence of subordinate word or words. Thus, the vocative case is more often preserved for single appeals, whilst the nominative case is chosen for appeals that have anagreed attribute or an apposition. This observation has led to the assumption that a dependent part of the sentence specified the appeal and turned a formulaic expression into an appeal in the literal sense. Since the grammeme of the vocative case was already in the process of destruction, such an appeal took the form of the nominative case. Based on the studied material, it was concluded that the vocative case was lost by the end of the Middle Russian period.