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Case Marking and Definiteness in Slavic Appositional Constructions
This paper is a corpus-based study of Slavic appositional constructions. Out of material taken from seven Slavic languages, two aspects of the morphosyntax of close appositions in Slavic are considered: case concord and definiteness marking. The first section of the paper considers the factors that affect case concord in appositions in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Czech, Polish, Croatian, and Slovenian. Based on the data of the corpora it is shown that in all seven languages, inherent plurality and frequency of proper names significantly affect the probability of concord being present. Moreover, it is shown that the likelihood of concord differs across cases, and almost all languages considered follow the case hierarchy GEN>DAT>LOC>INS. The second portion of the paper considers definiteness marking in Bulgarian and Macedonian appositional constructions. Based on the obtained data, it is argued that appositions with different lexemes can have different syntactic structures in these languages.