VOCATIVE VARIANTS IN THE CROATIAN AND UKRAINIAN LANGUAGES: MORPHOLOGICAL, PROSODIC FEATURES, FEATURES OF USE (compared to other Slavic Languages)

Abstract

The grammatical category of the case in the Ukrainian and Croatian languages is among the most important grammatical categories of a noun bearing in mind that it is consistently represented by the morphological means (the endings). The case is a regular type of the noun inflexion, which is divided into the biggest compared with the other morphological categories in the‑se languages morphological grammemes – seven cases – and is a consistently correlative morphological category of an absolute alternational type, characterized by closeness to the vocabulary influence. The case system is not expressed morphologically in Ukrainian and Croatian. In the grammatical structure of the Ukrainian and Croatian languages the vocative is usually represented by the morphological, syntactic and prosodic means. From the morphological point of view the vocative has in both languages in some cases an inflexional affix (the ending), indicating the syntactic bonds, semantic and syntactic relations of the form of the case to the other components of a sentence.We have explored the morphological and prosodic characteristics of the vocative and its semantic and syntactic variants in Ukrainian and Croatian. The vocative has its own distinguishing morphological features in the modern Ukrainian and Croatian languages. In both languages these are the ending and intonation. In the Croatian language, in contrast to the Ukrainian, the vocative is also characterized by the change of some other prosodic features. In particular, these are the changes of the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the accent, the length appearance, etc. In some cases, when in both languages the vocative is morphologically identical with the nominative, the absence of the morphological features is compensated by such a prosodic feature as the intonation. The prospect of this research is to expand the investigated material to trace the vocative usage, to reveal its competitive potential, and peculiarities of its functioning in the texts of different genres on the materials of the different Slav languages.