An Overview of the Tendencies for the Development of Dative-Locative Syncretism in Slavic Languages

This paper is an overview of linguistic phenomena leading to the formation of dative-locative syncretism in various Slavic languages, mainly in Slovak, Czech, Ukrainian, Slovene, Serbian, and Croatian. These innovations may be motivated either by semantics, where they are linked with the category of animacy, or by morphology, where they arise as an effect of the rearrangement of the inflection system. In both cases, the mechanisms forming the syncretism originate in Proto-Slavic, but the morphology-oriented changes are more likely to result in a full syncretism, whereas the semantic motivation keeps the innovation within the bounds of the paradigm of masculine animate nouns.