engleski

Nothing is something: Auxiliary omission in Croatian

This paper analyzes auxiliary omission in the Croatian compound preterit, arguing that unauxiliated l-participles express epistemic immediacy. The auxiliated compound preterit is a reference-point construction in which the auxiliary functions as a reference point via which the event is accessed (cf. Langacker [1990: 338–42] on the English perfect). That is, the auxiliary is a grounding predication relating the event expressed by the l-participle to the speech situation (ground ; Langacker [1990: 122]). Unauxiliated l-participles represent deviations from the reference-point/grounding mechanism. Though we have identified several types of omission of auxiliaries from the compound preterit based on corpus data, we focus on two constructions that have gone unnoticed and shed light on the semantic mechanisms at work: constructions with presentatives (evo ‘here’, eto ‘there’), cf. (1), and constructions containing two pronouns, cf. (2). (1) Evo ø odlučila i ja napravit blog i konačno napisat svoj prvi post. ‘Here I too decided to make a blog and finally write my first post.’ (2) Napao ti ø on mene da nemam neku dozvolu da nije … legalizirano. ‘He attacked me because I didn’t have some permit and it wasn’t legal.’ We argue that these collocations represent constructionalized alternatives to the grounding provided by the auxiliary. Presentative constructions represent a kind of hot-news perfect, as they communicate that the result of a recent event is immediately accessible in the ground. In these constructions, the presentative is a crucial grounding element, allowing cognitive access to the event through the ground. Double-pronoun constructions function to ground a predicate with respect to the subject and another participant and/or the interlocutor. Given that the bulk of pronoun constructions include a 1st-person pronoun in some case and that pronouns are sui generis grounding predications, the double-pronoun constructions refer via the ground as well. In addition to the constructions exemplified in (1–2), contextual scaffolding can license an unauxiliated l-participle that foregrounds the existence of a result at the time of speech, cf. (3). (3) Osakatili smo i izbetonizirali cijelu Jadransku obalu. Mnogi ø na miljune novaca strpali u džepove, ali pomaka u rješavanju tog problema nema, a niti će biti. ‘We mutilated the Adriatic coast and buried it in concrete. Many lined their pockets with millions, but there’s no progress on that problem and won’t be.’ Here the focus of the text is not the past ruination of the Adriatic coast, but the fact that many have money lining their pockets at the time of speech. We present statistical evidence based on a random sample of 5591 auxiliated and unauxiliated examples from the Croatian hrWaC corpus and the Serbian srWaC corpus, manually coded for a number of categories. Our preliminary data suggests that the constructions are less frequent in Serbian. We argue that the auxiliary omission in Croatian described above represents a phenomenon distinct from the omission of 3rd-person perfect auxiliaries to signal hearsay in Bulgarian and Macedonian, and consider the issue of mirativity as well as recent literature on South Slavic auxiliaries (Sonnenhauser [2014], Meerman [2015]). References Langacker, Ronald W. 1990. Concept, image, and symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Meermann, Anastasia. 2015. Truncated perfect in Serbian: A marker of distance? In Barbara Sonnenhauser and Anastasia Meermann (eds.), Distance in language: Grounding a metaphor, 95–116. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Sonnenhauser, Barbara. 2014. Constructing perspectivity in Balkan Slavic: Auxiliary variation and the tripartite article. Balkanistica 27. 105–40.

Croatian, cognitive grammar, grounding, auxiliaries, perfect

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