The Formant -päi (-piäi) in Postpositional Cases (on the Example of Livvi and Ludian Dialects)

Introduction. In contemporary grammars of the newly standardized Karelian language, it is customary to distinguish two postpositional variants of the elative and ablative markers: -späi/-spiäi and -lpäi/-lpiäi. Another case, the additive, formed by the fusion of the illative ending with the formant -päi (-piäi), has not yet been incorporated into the grammatical framework of the Karelian language. The aim of this study is to refine the grammatical rules of the newly standardized variants of the Livvi and Ludian dialects of Karelian. Materials and Methods. The study is based on materials from the Open Corpus of the Veps and Karelian languages. Traditional linguistic research methods were employed, including the general scientific, comparative-contrastive, and comparative-historical methods. These approaches enabled the identification and validation of the legitimacy of using the newest postpositional case forms in the Karelian language. Results and Discussion. The article examines the formation of new postpositional cases through the fusion of the postposition päi/päin with the local case marker. This process has contributed to the emergence of three cases in the Karelian language: elative, ablative, and additive. The first two have been incorporated into the newly standardized grammars of the Livvik dialect, while the additive case, despite its active use in spoken language, has not yet been formally included in grammatical descriptions. The Open Corpus of Veps and Karelian contains a substantial body of textual material, encompassing both dialectal texts and texts written in the standardized variants of the Karelian language. An analysis of newly written texts in the corpus reveals a lack of uniformity in the spelling of the additive case: the -päi/-piäi formant appears both as a single word and as a separate element. Conclusion. Based on the conducted analysis, the authors propose incorporating the additive into the newly standardized grammar of the Karelian language. The findings of this study may be useful for refining orthographic rules for the newly standardized variants of Karelian, as well as for the development of educational materials for the Ludic dialect. A more in-depth corpus analysis in the future may further contribute to the adjustment of certain orthographic rules in these variants, which is particularly important for the Ludic dialect, as its unified literary form is still in the process of development.