Vocative and nominative as an appellation: the language norm formation in the Soviet period
Authors: Kobchenko Natalia 
Published: November 2021

Background. The authors of Ukrainian grammar books published before 1933 were consentient that appellation expressed by a noun requires the use of the vocative case only. In 1933, new People’s Commissar of Education of the USSR V. Zatonskyi formed the commission ‘for auditing the work on the language front’. On the 26th of April, the Commission adopted several resolutions, among which there was the provision to review scholar and didactic books to reveal ‘nationalistic deformation’. After they had been made public, in the Soviet handbooks for higher and secondary education, one can find a statement that the ‘vocative form’ is used to express appellation. However, the “nominative case” can also occasionally perform this function.Purpose. The purpose of this paper is to compare the morphological variability of appellation expressing codified in the Soviet handbooks and the accurate appellation expressing in dramas of the 1920s – 30s of the XX century. To find out the presence or absence of the pragmatic differences between vocative and nominative in this function is in the focus of our analysis as well.Methods. The methodological base of research is the discourse-analytical approach, within we compound discourse analysis method (to descry the designing new syntactic norm in the linguistic-didactic discourse of the end of the 1930s – the beginning of the 50s) and content-analysis method (to find out the real means of expressing appellation in social realists’ dramas of the 1920s – 30s of the XX century).Results. Theory about vocative as non-case and legitimization of the term ‘called form (vocative form)’ to denote it became dominant in all Soviet Ukrainian language handbooks for secondary and higher education. There are no remarks about another qualification in this grammatical category in the analyzed handbooks, and it evidences the monologue style of the Soviet linguistic-didactic discourse. The authors of these handbooks codify a double language norm to express an appellation – the vocative form and the nominative case. The thesis about nominative as a means to denote an appellation is usually formulated in the way of a superficial remark that may be apprehended by a recipient as upon the table fact. The study of the morphological manifestation of appellations in the drama of late 1920–30s created by the authors transmitting the official party ideology proves that vocative case predominates. Nominative to denote appellation has mainly a pragmatic effect or is one of the means of creating characters. Moreover, only in O. Korniychuk’s plays the use of morphological forms of appellations does not follow any regularities.Discussion. Spreading the nominative case to denote appellation in modern colloquial speech is conditioned by the complex of factors. On the one hand, it is a loosening of language norm in Soviet handbooks and on the other hand, it is the fact that morphological forms of vocative and nominative in plural nouns and singular nouns of neutral gender are homonymous. However, this thesis is needed verification on more comprehensive language material that represents different functional styles of the Ukrainian language.