Areal and diachronic trends in argument flagging across Slavic

Abstract

AbstractThis pilot study examines the variation in the flagging patterns across 10 modern Slavic languages—covering all three major Slavic branches: South, West, and East Slavic—and Old Church Slavic. Despite high homogeneity in this domain across Slavic, there are clear genealogical and areal trends that explain the distribution of different flagging patterns across Slavic. Thus, regarding transitivity prominence, an areal trend splitting Slavic languages into Northeast Slavic (Belarusian, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian) and Southwest Slavic (all other languages) was detected, the former group showing relatively low and the latter high transitivity prominence. The same split is also seen in the ratio of nominative marking of the subject(-like) arguments, albeit to a minor degree. Here too, Northeast Slavic languages have a lower ratio than the Southwest ones. Although the genealogical relations still largely determine similarities in argument flagging, language contact must have played an important role here as well.