A Contrastive Perspective on Several Morphosyntactic Features of Upper Sorbian

The article examines several morphosyntactic features of Upper Sorbian that are not shared by other Slavic languages. These include: a) conflation in the derivation of possessive forms of feminine nouns (both proper and common) and that of married women’s surnames, as evidenced by their occurrence in some serial possessive constructions; b) the apparent conflation or syncretism of the dative and accusative short forms of the Upper Sorbian reflexive pronoun (sej, so);c) the use of žadyn ‘no, none’ as an indefinite pronoun or adjective signifying ‘someone/anyone, some’; d) variability in the simple negation of compound verb tenses; and e) the use of forms of the conditional/subjunctive mood to denote a future-in-the-past in the sentential complements of past-tense performatives (verba dicendi and verba cogitandi).Both the possibility and the probability of external influence on the enumerated features of contemporary Upper Sorbian morphosyntax are taken into account—influence from German and Czech in particular. The features are thus analyzed descriptively from a contrastive perspective. It is concluded that while the possibility of German and Czech influences on Upper Sorbian morphosyntax cannot be discounted completely, the probability of such influences—given internal developments in Sorbian itself—is low

Adjective · Czech · Dative case · Evidentiality · German · Linguistics · Noun · Perspective (graphical · Possessive · Pronoun · Slavic languages · Syncretism (linguistics · Verb · History · Language and Culture · Linguistics and language evolution · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Mathematics · Philosophy

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