Verbālu vārdkopu lietojums sociālajos medijos: lokatīva un prievārda UZ konkurence
The use of verbal phrases in social media: Competition between the locative and the preposition UZ ‘to, on’

Summary/Abstract: The development of Latvian language shows not only the competition of cases, but also the variants of the use of non-prepositional and prepositional constructions. In the conditions of language contact, it is essential to study whether the locative is alive or whether inappropriate prepositional constructions with the preposition UZ (‘to, on’) are common in language use. The competition between the locative and the preposition UZ is still topical. The aim of the article is to analyse verbal phrases in social media from the point of view of syntactic valence, comparing the use of the locative and the preposition UZ in terms of spatial position and spatial direction. The empirical material of the research is unedited social media posts on Facebook and Twitter, or X, recorded from January 2022 to January 2025. It consists of around 400 utterances in which verbal phrases with the dependent component in locative or construction with the preposition UZ have been found. For in-depth analysis, three verbs atrasties ‘to be located’, ierasties ‘to arrive, come’ and nokļūt ‘to get to’ have been selected, whose semantic-syntactic connection is dominated by direct government in the locative, but their rection also allows indirect government with a prepositional construction, using the preposition UZ. The usage of the mentioned verbs is compared in the corpus of the Latvian language „Pandemic Diaries” (PanDi). The results of the research show that the positions of the locative in the use of verbal phrases in social media are relatively stable. In cases of parallelism, it is necessary to assess whether there is syntactic synonymy of phrases or greater or lesser semantic differences. In expressing the meaning of place, the competition between the locative and the preposition UZ in connection with verbs atrasties, ierasties, and nokļūt is small.

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