engleski

The impact of English on six Croatian prepositional structures

English as a global language exerts an overwhelming influence on other languages. The present paper deals with the way English influences the use of prepositions in the standard Croatian language. Over the past years, an increase in use of incorrect prepositions in both public and private communication has been noticed. The paper focuses on six structures that have appeared in the standard Croatian language in recent years, and are literal translations of English structures. The experiment was conducted using E-prime 2 software. The sample included 40 subjects who are students of the English language at the University of Rijeka. The authors look at the error rate and response times. The task included three types of structures: prepositional structures that follow the English pattern, prepositional structures that are correct in Croatian, and prepositional structures that are incorrect in Croatian, but do not follow the pattern of English structures. The results indicate that the subjects have developed new processing patterns for the structures that follow the English pattern, in addition to the processing patterns for the appropriate Croatian structures that they already had.

prepositional structures ; Croatian ; English as a global language ; processing patterns

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