Has Tatar influenced the syntax of Udmurt relational nouns?

Abstract Udmurt and Tatar are two languages that have very similar typological profiles and have been in contact for a long time. Tatar has influenced Udmurt in many respects, especially its vocabulary and phonology, with Udmurt dialects in the South affected more than those in the North. Udmurt relational nouns (also called inflected postpositions) exhibit dialectal variation in case marking of their pronominal complement and possessive agreement with it. I sketch the geographic distribution of these features, based mainly on the questionnaire responses I collected in the field. I arrive at the conclusion that Tatar has had no part in shaping this distribution. The patterns attested in the Southern varieties most strongly influenced by Tatar bear no resemblance to the morphosyntax of Tatar relational nouns. The only way Tatar might have affected possessive agreement in Udmurt RelNPs is indirectly, through reshaping the Udmurt NP. Even if that was the case, Tatar must have tapped into a “minor use pattern” that had already existed in Udmurt. This demonstrates once again that structural similarity does not suffice for replication of grammatical structures.