The Ukrainian System of Declension

Abstract

1. Analysis of the grammatically complete sentence in Ukrainian reveals, as elsewhere in Indo-European, the familiar 'logical' polarity of subject and predicate. The nucleus of the subject is preponderantly a nominal element, that of the predicate a verbal one; apart from their characteristic suffixes of derivation, the first is defined morphologically by a system of declension, the second by a system of conjugation, i.e. by two contrasting patterns of flexion. The fact of flexion itself serves as a criterion to discriminate between the inflected and the uninflected lexical constituents (lexemes) of the language. The nominal system is, if anything, rather more involved than the verbal and covers the expression of a series of notional categories, only some of which (e.g. person and number) it shares with the verb. Selected case-relations are represented by more or less characteristic morphemes, and the variety of these is multiplied by the demands of gender and number. The clarity of the Ukrainian system of declension is somewhat obscured by the intrusion of the category of gender into a slowly disintegrating complex of variant paradigms. The predominance of gender inflexion is so obvious that synchronic grammar prefers a generic classification of declensional types to the earlier diachronic classification by stems defined partly in hypothetical terms (o-declension, d-declension, etc.). Nominal flexion implies the expression of several sets of correlations of varying scope: NUMBER, pointing a contrast between singular and plural; GENDER, here a complex of four antitheses (animate/inanimate, personal/impersonal, feminine/non-feminine, masculine/neuter) expressed in three overlapping generic groups; SYNTACTIC POSITION, opposing attributive to predicative function; and CASE, which presents the dichotomy of nominative (casus rectus) and oblique (casus obliquus), the former regarded as fundamental and amorphemic (merkmallos'), the latter embodied in a paradigm of semantically associated endings. The category of number shows vestiges of a dual, which has complicated the syntax of the genitive singular without affecting the correlation of singular and plural. This antithesis, however, is not uniform, as it does not possess the same connotation in the substantive and its immediate congeners on the one hand and the personal pronoun on the other (see below), and even in the substantive the plural may be conceived as either collective or multiplex. Gender, notionally, is more than the customary grammatical trinity of masculine, feminine, and neuter; it represents the intersection of the categories of animateness, person, and sex with their characteristic polarities. As for the case paradigms, they offer only a few instances of the correlatives nominative and oblique (e.g. sto