Björn Hansen, Veronika Wald, Zrinka Kolaković

Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie, Jahrgang 74 (2018), Ausgabe 1, Seite 113 - 195

Subject Case and finiteness: A Corpus Based Study on Microvariation and Historical Development of Modal Constructions in Croatian. Part 1: Microvariation in Modern Croatian The paper is one of the very first specifically addressing the nature of subject encoding in constructions expressing the notions of possibility and necessity. It gives a comprehensive account of the microvariation of the encoding of the subject in relation to finiteness in Croatian modal constructions. As a matter of fact, in this language, modals allow for canonical and non-canonical subjects (‘Ljudi trebaju raditi‘ vs ‘Ljudima valja raditi’.). Apart from that, there is variation in the marking of subject-predicate agreement (‘Ljudi moraju raditi’ vs. ‘Ljudi mora da su radili’.). Some of these – as we call them – constellations of subject case and agreement patterns are the target of normativist debates. The paper starts out with a thorough description of the current language use based on data from the largest available corpus of modern Croatian hrWaC 2.0, a web corpus accessible via sketch engine. These data are contrasted with the most important normativist work on modern standard Croatian. In a next step, we discuss the features of subjects using a multifactorial framework inspired by the seminal work by Keenan from 1976 who distinguishes coding, control and semantic features. In a corpus-driven study we detect six possible combinations of different marking of subject, agreement and tense (constellation types). Some of these types are linked to epistemic modality like e. g. ‘Ljudi mora da su radili’. The modal ‘trebati’ turns out to be the most versatile element as it allows for all six constellation types. In the final section, we discuss the specific nature of subjects in modal constructions. It will be shown that some of the central control features discussed in literature such as the binding of reflexives, are not applicable to subjects of modal constructions. These subjects do not have as full a complement of properties as Keenan postulated for subjects of non-modal sentences.

Björn Hansen

Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie, Jahrgang 74 (2018), Ausgabe 2, Seite 257 - 289

Subject Case and Finiteness: A Corpus-Based Study on Microvariation and Historical Development of Modal Constructions in Croatian Part 2: The Historical Development The second part of the contribution is dedicated to the question of how the considerable microvariation of the encoding of subject and finiteness in Croatian modal constructions described in the first part came about. More precisely, we analyse the changes a) in the inventory of modal predicates and b) in the distribution of the constellation types attested in modern Croatian language use. For this specific purpose, we built a corpus resource for the history of Croatian CroDi (available on-line: http://hu.berlin/crodi). In the first section, we describe the principles of corpus compilation, the corpus architecture and the texts included. Currently, CroDi comprises texts ranging from the 16th to the 18th century, which thus form separate subcorpora for each century. We include texts written in Štokavian, Čakavian and Kajkavian repre- senting a major variety of genres. Based on the analysis of all modal constructions found in CroDi (2.985 sentences) we detect certain changes in the modal system of Croatian across the centuries: 1) there are several lexical changes; some modal elements disappear (like uzmožan), others are innovations (e. g. morati, valjati) and a third class of elements undergoes semantic and mor- pho-syntactic changes. We specifically address the modal trebati which in modern usage is one of the most frequent ones, but is not attested in our historical corpus. There is evidence that it developed from the nominal form treba/triba not earlier than during the 18th century; 2) The distribution of the modals across parts of speech shows a certain conti- nuity, as from the very beginning verbs clearly dominate and nouns are subsequently getting out of use; 3) Concerning the development of the constellation types we show that the type Ljudi moraju raditi prevails already in the 16th century and becomes even more frequent later. The type Ljudima valja raditi is attested in the 16th century and remains in use with relatively low frequency. It is shown that the type Ljudi mora da su radili is not yet attested in CroDi, which leads us to the hypothesis that it must be an innovation not earlier than of the 19th century. We have come to the conclusion that the encoding of the subject in Croatian is relatively stable, but we see changes in tense and agreement marking.