Direct object position in Serbo-Croatian

Danijela Stojanovic'

Sat. 2:00-3:40 B

The goal of this study is to investigate the direct object position in the Serbo-Croatian sentence. Serbo-Croatian is a configurational SVO language in which a number of different syntactic operations may apply to the object, moving it out of the base-generated position. The base-generated and some of the derived positions are illustrated (1) though (3) below.

(1) Mislim, nije potpisala cek. (MB/336)

think1PPres, not-aux3Pres sign3PPastP ChequeACC

"I mean, she didn't sign the cheque."

(2) A onda bi mogla pismo jedno ponijeti? (HK/006)

and then aux3PPres can3PPastP letterACC oneACC takeINF

"She could, then, take one letter."

(3) Hoc'u ovo [da ti ispricam].

want1PPres thisACCthat you DAT tellSubj (BK/888)

"I want to tell you this."

This paper will examine the variation in the syntactic position the direct (DO) may occupy in a sentence, as well as semantic and phonological factors that may act as triggers for movement.

The theoretical model adopted in this study is that of Government and Binding (Chomsky: 1981). The positions in which an object NP may occur at surface structure are: VP-internal (base-generated), VP-adjoined, IP-adjoined, SpecCP and clause-external position. Two object types, full NP and pronominal objects, may undergo three main structural movement operations, i.e. Topicalization, Scrambling and Object Shift. The primary goal of this study was to examine the structural position of the DO and to capture any systematic pattern of distribution.

529 clauses with a transitive verb and DO, extracted from natural speech of four Serbo-Croatian speakers, were coded exhaustively for ten different linguistic factors. A number of analyses were carried out, using Goldvarb (Sankoff and Rand: 1990), to examine the linguistic factors playing a major role in the DO movement out of its base-generated position.

Overall results indicate that less than one third of DOs (27%) undergo movement from their base-generated position. The results strongly suggest that two factors influence most the surface structure position of the DO: the type of object (lexical versus pronominal NP) and its reference within a discourse domain (new vs. coreferential). Full NP objects, irrespective of the heaviness (un/modified) tend to remain more in the base-generated position than any type of pronominal DO. As soon as an element is linked to a discourse antecedent, it tends to move out of the VP. Thus pronominal objects undergo more raising above the VP than full NP objects. Furthermore, different analyses were run for each of the structural positions tested. Findings suggest that, apart from the main linguistic factors mentioned above, some additional factors, related to inherent properties of each syntactic position, are also significant.

One main point is to be derived from the study of the DO position in Serbo-Croatian. The so-called free word order is, in fact, a very restricted word order. It is derived by syntactic movement operations which extract elements out of their base-generated positions. These movements, however, are subject to a number of constraints, regarding the elements that move, the positions in which they land, as well as triggers for movement.