Из истории форм обращения в русском, украинском и болгарском языках

The forms of the vocative are analysed across three genealogically related languages, of which Russian and Ukrainian developed out of Old Russian and Bulgarian was descended from Old Bulgarian. The analysis clearly manifests some common typological features between Bulgarian and Ukrainian in contrast with Russian, which had lost the morphological markers for the vocative. It seems evident, however, that vocative forms are being reduced due to the identification of the vocative inflections with the masculine and feminine noun forms. It is worth pointing out that Bulgarian is characterized by quite significant phonetic and morphological changes which, to all appearances, have to be accounted for by the loss of the case inflections and the advent of analytism. Ukrainian, on the other hand, has preserved to a much greater extent the traditional morphological markers, characteristic of the Old Russian vocative forms.