Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 134–159 brill.com/jlc Ukrainian in the Language Map of Central Europe: Questions of Areal-Typological Profiling Andrii Danylenko Department of Modern Languages and Cultures Pace University, New York
[email protected] Abstract The paper deals with the areal-typological profiling of Ukrainian among languages of Europe, constituting Standard Average European (SAE) and especially Central European (CE). Placed recently in the context of the ‘areal typology’ and the ‘dynamic taxonomy’, Ukrainian together with Russian and Belarusian appear to be mere replica languages. Such languages are capable of only borrowing surface structures migrating all over the Europe unie or imitating deep structures on the model of SAE or CE. In order to elaborate on an alternative profiling of Ukrainian among languages of (Central) Europe, the author concentrates on both phonological and morphosyntactic features treated commonly as CE Sprachbund-forming (the spirantization of *g, the dispalatalization of the pala- talized consonants, the existence of medial l, the umlauting, the three-tense system, including a simple preterit from the perfect, and the periphrastic ‘ingressive’ future). As a result, the author advances another vector of areal classification, thus positioning Russian in the core of ‘Standard Average Indo-European’ and (Southwest) Ukrainian as an intermediate language between Russian and the rest of (Central) European languages. Keywords Ukrainian; North Slavic; Central European Sprachbund; ‘Standard Average Indo-European’; areal-typological profiling 1. Introduction In comparative and typological studies, Ukrainian has been routinely treated as a transitional language from East Slavic (cf. Jakobson, 1929; Stadnik, 2001:94) to North Slavic (Mrázek, 1990:28-30; Besters-Dilger, 2000), West Slavic (Lehfeldt, 1972:333-336) or even South Slavic (Smal-Stockyj and Gartner, 1913).