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Losing It: Unauxiliated Compound Preterits in Croatian

Interest in the fate of the Proto-Slavic perfect tense continues, especially with respect to the loss of auxiliaries in Slavic languages (cf., e.g., Stanojević [2011], Sonnenhauser [2011], Dickey [2013]). This paper analyzes the omission of auxiliaries in the contemporary Croatian compound preterit, and makes the following assumptions: (1) The compound preterit in Croatian (as well as in Bosnian and Serbian) is a grounding predication, i.e., a reference-point construction in which a past event is accessed via the ground, which is signaled by the auxiliary. (2) The l-participle itself signals a post-event state, and metonymically the event itself ; accordingly, the Croatian unauxiliated l-participle expresses no particular value for (epistemic) distance. (3) An explanation of unauxiliated compound preterits in Croatian must explain (and indeed proceed from) the fact that 3rd-person singular auxiliaries are regularly omitted with reflexive verbs in standard štokavian (and most dialects), as shown in (1): (1) a. Vratio ø se. ‘He came back’ b. Vratio sam se. ‘I came back’. Though we have identified several contexts in which auxiliaries are omitted from the compound preterit, we focus on two kinds of constructions that have largely gone unnoticed and seem to shed light on the semantic mechanisms at work: constructions with the presentatives evo ‘here’ and eto ‘there’, cf. (2), and constructions containing an l-participle followed by two pronouns, cf. (3). (2) Evo ø odlučila i ja napravit blog i konačno napisat svoj prvi post. ‘Here I too have decided to make a blog and write my first post.’ (3) Napao ti ø on mene da nemam neku dozvolu … i sve tako. ‘He attacked me saying that I don’t have some sort of a license … and so on.’ We believe that these collocations represent constructionalized alternatives to the grounding that is otherwise provided by the auxiliary. Constructions with presentatives represent a kind of hot-news perfect, as they only occur to communicate that something has just happened. In these constructions the presentative is a crucial grounding element, allowing cognitive access to the recent event through the ground of the speaker. Constructions with two pronouns function to ground a predicate with respect to the subject and either another participant or the interlocutor (via an ethical dative such as ti ‘you.DAT’). The grounding function of pronouns originates with the accusative reflexive se (cf. [1a] above). In short, the anaphoric function of two (or more) pronouns provides sufficient reference to a previously mentioned context to ground the predicate. Note that the presentative construction and the pronominal construction are not mutually exclusive, as seen in (2), which also has a pronoun (ja ‘I’). This paper discusses these phenomena in more detail and with respect to similar phenomena in Czech and Balkan Slavic. References Dickey, Stephen M. (2013) “See, Now They Vanish: Third-Person Perfect Auxiliaries in Old and Middle Czech.” Journal of Slavic Linguistics 21(1): 77–121. Sonnenhauser, Barbara. (2011) “‘Renarrativ’ und indirekte Rede im Bulgarischen.” Die Welt der Slaven 56: 131–154. Stanojević, Mateusz-Milan. (2011) “Modeling Epistemic Distance: The Croatian L-Participle.” Suvremena lingvistika 72: 219–239.

unauxiliated compound preterit; Croatian; cognitive grammar; backdoor grounding

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