engleski

Accusative/instrumental case marking with the Croatian verbs of movement

Our paper discusses the class of Croatian verbs which can have either an accusative or an instrumental complement. These are verbs of movement such as drmati ‘shake’, micati ‘move’, klimati ‘nod’, and vrtjeti ‘spin’, etc. Ten aspectual pairs have been examined by the corpus search to see whether there is correlation between semantics and the case of the noun phrase, and whether there is a correlation between the aspect of the verb (perfective vs. imperfective) and the case of the noun (accusative vs. instumental). In regard to the first question, we observed that the nouns reffering to body parts tend to appear in the instrumental case, while the nouns reffering to a person, a group of people, or collective entites tend to appear in the accusative case with certain verbs. Also, when the examined verbs where used figureatively, their complemnts appeared in the accustive case. In regard to second question, on the basis of our resarch, we did not find a significant correlation between the apsect of the verb and the choice of the case of verb’s complement.

complements, accusative, instrumental, Croatian

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