Participles come back to Slovenian
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Wayles Browne
Abstract
In Slavic noun phrases an adjective normally precedes a noun, as in English ‘new student’. If the adjective has a complement of its own, in half the languages, e.g. Russian, this complement follows it: ‘a new-to-me student’. Russian historically lost most of its participles, but later they were borrowed back in from Church Slavonic, and in keeping with their value of adjective derived from a verb, they fit into the adjective-complement-noun word order: ‘a reading-books student’. Slovenian, like e.g. Czech and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, instead has complement-adjective-noun word order in its noun phrase: ‘a to-me-new student’. Slovenian lost most participles, but active participles were later re-introduced, and these indeed joined the existing Slovenian complement-adjective-noun order: ‘a books-reading student’.
Abstract
In Slavic noun phrases an adjective normally precedes a noun, as in English ‘new student’. If the adjective has a complement of its own, in half the languages, e.g. Russian, this complement follows it: ‘a new-to-me student’. Russian historically lost most of its participles, but later they were borrowed back in from Church Slavonic, and in keeping with their value of adjective derived from a verb, they fit into the adjective-complement-noun word order: ‘a reading-books student’. Slovenian, like e.g. Czech and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, instead has complement-adjective-noun word order in its noun phrase: ‘a to-me-new student’. Slovenian lost most participles, but active participles were later re-introduced, and these indeed joined the existing Slovenian complement-adjective-noun order: ‘a books-reading student’.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction with a state of the art in generative Slovenian syntax 1
- On second position clitics crosslinguistically 23
- Participles come back to Slovenian 55
- Restructuring restructuring 69
- Clitics are/become Minimal(ist) 91
- The left periphery of Slovenian relative clauses 129
- Unaccusatives in Slovenian from a cross-linguistic perspective 145
- The modal cycle vs. negation in Slovenian 167
- The left periphery of multiple wh-questions in Slovenian 193
- A relative syntax and semantics for Slovenian 221
- The Slovenian future auxiliary biti as a tenseless gradable evidential modal 253
- Not two sides of one coin 283
- Quo vadis, Slovenian bipartite pronouns? 313
- Language index 329
- Subject index 331
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction with a state of the art in generative Slovenian syntax 1
- On second position clitics crosslinguistically 23
- Participles come back to Slovenian 55
- Restructuring restructuring 69
- Clitics are/become Minimal(ist) 91
- The left periphery of Slovenian relative clauses 129
- Unaccusatives in Slovenian from a cross-linguistic perspective 145
- The modal cycle vs. negation in Slovenian 167
- The left periphery of multiple wh-questions in Slovenian 193
- A relative syntax and semantics for Slovenian 221
- The Slovenian future auxiliary biti as a tenseless gradable evidential modal 253
- Not two sides of one coin 283
- Quo vadis, Slovenian bipartite pronouns? 313
- Language index 329
- Subject index 331
