Naslov
Morphological doublets in Croatian: the case of the instrumental singular

Autori
Lečić, Dario

Izvornik
Russian linguistics (0304-3487) 39 (2015), 3; 375-393

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Radovi u časopisima, članak, znanstveni

Ključne riječi
Croatian, Instrumental case, inflectional morphology, corpus

Sažetak
Inflectional doubletism is a linguistic phenomenon in which two or more forms occupy the same cell in an inflectional paradigm. Slavonic languages, with their rich morphological systems, abound in examples of this phenomenon. Croatian, a South Slavonic language, does not differ in that respect. This article looks at one specific example of inflectional doubletism in Croatian: the instrumental singular of the first declension type. There are three families of masculine nouns that allow two endings in this case: nouns ending in the morpheme -ar, nouns ending in a palatal sound and nouns ending in -io. The two endings in question are -om and -em. However, even though both forms are equally possible, they are not used to the same extent. The present study first considers the actual distributions of the two endings in a corpus of Croatian. After that, it reports the results of two questionnaire studies in which sentences with the forms in question were given to native speakers to evaluate. We have carried out a quantitative analysis to determine whether the intuitions of native speakers mirror the corpus distributions of the respective forms.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

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