Morphological adaptation of borrowed nouns with final -o in Ukrainian: a corpus-based study

Abstract

The paper describes the use of declined and invariable paradigms of borrowed nouns with the final –o (of the type avto ‘car’, bjuro ‘bureau, office’) exemplified by the General regionally annotated corpus of the Ukrainian language (GRAC, uacorpus.org). The texts of different styles from different regions of Ukraine and the diaspora, written from the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 21st century, are analyzed. The degree of variability and stylistic markedness of competing morphological forms are shown depending on the time and place of creation of the texts in question. The declension of borrowed words with the final –o was acceptable as an option in Ukraine until about the end of the Second World War, then practically absent in the Soviet texts of 1950–1990, and after 1991 the share of this variant again increases slightly. According to the official norm, in the post-war period in Ukraine the invariable paradigm of the borrowed nouns with the final –o, with the single exception of pal’to ‘coat’, was the only option. The inflected variants were rarely used at this time in Soviet texts, usually as a marker of colloquial style. In the language of the diaspora, the tendency to inflect the borrowed nouns with the final –o is stronger, there was no stylistic difference between the inflected and non-inflected variants. In the modern Ukrainian language in Ukraine, the inflected variants of borrowed nouns in many cases retain stylistic markedness, signalling the Western Ukrainian influence, the diaspora tradition or a sign of departure from the Soviet norm. A study of contemporary Kiev and Lviv newspapers has shown that regional differences in the use of these grammatical variants are virtually absent in nonfiction texts. Normative invariable forms prevail in both editions, therefore, the inflected forms in modern journalism can be considered a purely stylistic variant. Keywords: Ukrainian grammar, diachronic evolution, corpus, declension, morphology, borrowings.