Predicative Possession in Ukrainian and Intra‐Slavonic Language Contact

Journal article

Ukrainian has two inherited syntactic forms for possessive have: a transitive one with a lexical have‐verb, and an intransitive, originally locative be‐construction. On the basis of four corpus studies, the article establishes their relative frequency in Middle Ukrainian writing (17th and 18th c.), Modern Ukrainian dialects (20th c.), and contemporary Standard Ukrainian (post‐2000). The aim is to investigate whether contact with neighbouring Slavonic languages – Polish, Russian, and Belarusian – may have had an influence on the frequencies observed. The areal‐ and historical‐sociolinguistic context and evidence of other contact‐induced features provide arguments that Polish influence enhanced or sustained the frequency of the have‐possessive in Middle Ukrainian writing and 20th‐c. South‐Western Ukrainian, and Russian influence the frequency of the be‐possessive in 20th‐c. South‐Eastern and Northern Ukrainian, with possible transitional Belarusian features in the latter too. The contact‐induced frequency effects do not involve borrowing or calquing; nor do they necessarily run counter to language‐internal developments. It is argued that they still constitute a key mechanism in language contact, especially between closely related languages. For contemporary, post‐2000 written Standard Ukrainian, the study finds a stable, pan‐Ukrainian prevalence of the have‐ over the be‐possessive. The underlying distributional regularities are contact‐independent but require further examination.

Authors: Fellerer, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Journal: Transactions of the Philological Society
• Publication date: 2025-11-28
• Acceptance date: 2025-10-31
• DOI: 10.1111/1467-968x.70014
• EISSN: 1467-968X
• ISSN: 0079-1636
• Language: English