The Chuvash Postposition valli and the Mari Postposition verč : Focusing on the Case Marking of Complements

Chuvash (Oghur branch, Turkic) and Mari (Finno-Ugric, Uralic) are distributed in the Middle Volga region of Russia. Both languages have been in extremely close contact, leading to a profound symbiosis. This study focuses on postpositions that express purpose or the benefactive in both languages (Chuvash: valli, Mari: verč). Despite the difference that the Chuvash valli only expresses purpose or the benefactive (“for”), while Mari verč also expresses reason (“because of”) in addition to the two above (“for”), they are similar in that their nominal complements can be marked either by nominative, dative (dative-accusative in Chuvash), or genitive case (e.g., Chuvash: xalăx/xalăx-a valli [people.NOM/people-DAT.ACC valli] “for people,” un/ăna valli [that.GEN/that.DAT.ACC valli] “for that” Mari: kalək/kalək-lan verč [people.NOM/ people-DAT verč] “for/because of people,” tudən/tudlan verč [that.GEN/that.DAT verč] “for/because of that”). This similarity may have resulted from language contact between Chuvash and Mari, because this type of three-way case marking of complements is not found in neighboring and major cognate languages, and a corpus-based quantitative survey revealed some similarities in the frequency of each case form. This study proposes the hypothesis that the dative/dative-accusative marking is an innovation, although clarifying the language in which the innovation occurred first requires further research.