A Bottom-Up Reconstruction of the History of the Serbo-Croatian Clitic System

Modern Serbo-Croatian features an extensive system of clitics, with an inventory featuring pronominal, verbal, and reflexive clitics. These clitics occur in second position, and display clustering behavior in which multiple clitics in an utterance cluster together in second position, in a specific order. The Serbo-Croatian clitic system has been studied, synchronically and diachronically, by syntacticians, but comparative study of its history is lacking. In this work, the comparative method is applied to dialectal variations in realization of the clitic chain in Štokavian to unearth the history of the clitic chain in Serbo-Croatian. The findings are compared to the clitic systems of Old Church Slavonic and (historical) Bulgarian to reconstruct a historical Serbo-Croatian system that would have existed in approximately the 9th century AD. Though specific forms are addressed, this investigation’s primary focus is on the realization of the clitic cluster as whole rather than the...Show moreModern Serbo-Croatian features an extensive system of clitics, with an inventory featuring pronominal, verbal, and reflexive clitics. These clitics occur in second position, and display clustering behavior in which multiple clitics in an utterance cluster together in second position, in a specific order. The Serbo-Croatian clitic system has been studied, synchronically and diachronically, by syntacticians, but comparative study of its history is lacking. In this work, the comparative method is applied to dialectal variations in realization of the clitic chain in Štokavian to unearth the history of the clitic chain in Serbo-Croatian. The findings are compared to the clitic systems of Old Church Slavonic and (historical) Bulgarian to reconstruct a historical Serbo-Croatian system that would have existed in approximately the 9th century AD. Though specific forms are addressed, this investigation’s primary focus is on the realization of the clitic cluster as whole rather than the etymologies of individual pronominal forms. As such, areas of interest addressed in this work include the place of occurrence of the clitic cluster and the order of clitics within the clitic cluster, including the unique placements of 3Sg. present verbal clitic je and reflexive clitic se. Among other findings, one of the central conclusions of this work is that the modern Serbo-Croatian clitic order largely reflects the one found in Old Church Slavonic, with key differences. These include the innovative genitival pronominal clitics, as well as cluster-final occurrence of reflexive se and 3Sg. verbal clitic je. The occurrence of the ancient reflexive clitic se near the rightmost end of the Serbo-Croatian cluster results from attraction of this clitic to the verb. Conversely, 3Sg. verbal clitic je, which occurs at the end of the Serbo-Croatian clitic cluster, reflects a late date of cliticization, owed to the occurrence of nominal sentences in Slavic. Another key conclusion is that the second position placement of the cluster is archaic but coexisted with other placement systems over the history of Serbo-Croatian.Show less

Leiden University Student Repository

Documents

In Collections

A Bottom-Up Reconstruction of the History of the Serbo-Croatian Clitic System