«NEDAROM POMNIT VSYA ROSSIYA PRO DEN’... BORODINO», OR WHY TOPONYMS ENDING ON -INO, -OVO STOP TO BE DECLINED

Abstract

On the basis of the National Corpus of the Russian language, it is shown that the current trend of modern Russian to loose of declension of toponyms of the neuter gender, ending on -ino, -ovo, is a consequence of the increased internal migration of the Russian population. As a result of migration, cases of communication among people with unequal background knowledge have become frequent, which leads to the development of analyticism, and in particular, to the loss of declension of nouns like Pushkino or Izmailovo. The fact is that only the use of indeclinable forms of these toponyms gives uninformed addressees the opportunity to determine that such toponyms are nouns of the neuter, and not of the masculine gender, for example, that it is mentioned a town called Pushkino, not Pushkin.

Keywords

• toponyms on -ino -ovo
• indeclinable nouns
• analyticism
• heterogeneous language community
• homonymy of case forms