Abstract
West Polesian is an understudied Eastern Slavonic variety spoken between Belarus, Ukraine and Poland. The speech community has been geographically isolated for centuries, contributing to the preservation of older forms of Slavonic, but also the development of innovations. Nowadays it is surrounded by several closely related and standardised varieties that cause interference. This work provides a typological approach to the particularities that distinguish West Polesian morphology and syntax from its neighbours. Besides documenting and describing the morphology and syntax, I deal with theoretical questions that arise in the light of the data collected through fieldwork. I devote most of my attention to three phenomena. The first one is the adnumerative form, a morphosyntactic form that only appears when a noun is headed by specific numerals. I start by describing numerals and numeral phrases in West Polesian, and I narrow the focus to the interactions with nouns. The morphosyntactic nature of the adnumerative is complicated: it displays properties of both case and number values, but neither of them fully. Using insights from Canonical Typology I give an analysis of its morphology, syntax and the canonical behaviour of features and values. The second one is suppletion, which strongly characterises the adnumerative cells of the noun paradigms. I use the suppletive nouns ‘year’ and ‘person’ to see what they can teach us about suppletion in general. Still within the framework of Canonical Typology, I show how these nouns approach the canonical instance of suppletion and how they have the most complex paradigms in the Slavonic family. And the third one is the surpassingly large inventory of constructions West Polesian has developed to express futurity. I evaluate whether they are all legitimate (i.e. grammaticalised) constructions; and if so, what is their origin and relation to other future tense constructions in Europe.