‘Pre’ and ‘post’ marking in Nanosyntax: the case of a prepositional dative in a dialectal Polish

Abstract The Podlasie dialect of Polish exhibits a curious nominal case declension paradigm where the dative is expressed by a preposition and a genitive suffix ( prep N -gen ), which constitutes a typologically rare pattern. Moreover, the instrumental in this dialect, which is hierarchically above the dative, is marked with only a suffix (N -ins ), unexpectedly dropping the preposition. The fact that a hierarchically higher case drops a preposition challenges a generalization made in Caha (2009. The Nanosyntax of case . CASTL/University of Tromsø dissertation), which builds on Blake’s (2001. Case , 2nd edn. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press) hierarchy concerning the morphological marking of case. The paper explores how these two atypical patterns follow from the Nanosyntactic lexicalization procedure, offering an analysis that contributes to the discussion of ‘pre’ and ‘post’ marking in morphosyntax. The analysis also sheds light on why the pattern of the case declension attested in the Podlasie dialect is typologically rare.