| Description: |
Gefördert vom PRIME-Programm des DAAD The proposed project builds on the results of the DFG project Microvariation of the Pronominal and Auxiliary Clitics in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. Empirical Studies of Spoken Languages, Dialects and Heritage Languages (Kolaković et al. 2022). Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian (BCS) idioms are particularly interesting to linguists since they allow clitics (CLs) to be placed 1) after the first stressed word, 2) after the first constituent consisting of two or more content words, and 3) after the second constituent. However, the question of the frequency and acceptability of these three competing placement possibilities is still open. Because of many contradictions in the normative and theoretical linguistic literature, scholars acknowledge (e.g., Franks & Peti-Stantić 2006: 4; Alexander 2009: 50) that there is still a great need to prove how acceptable different types of CL placement options are. This project aims to respond to the needs of the scientific community and broaden the emerging empirical database substantially during two research stays at the NorS Institute and the ELLSA lab. The big data surveys and large-scale analyses envisaged by the proposed project will provide new experimental perspectives on second position, phrase splitting, and delayed placement of pronominal, reflexive, and verbal clitics on the left edge of the main clause in contemporary standard Croatian. Scholarly literature reports that the hypothetical optionality in CL placement is ruled by many salient linguistic and extralinguistic factors. Therefore, I will design the studies by building upon existing results. However, the approach taken in the proposed project diverges crucially from previous studies on this topic in the following ways. 1) I will focus on all three CL placement possibilities (even-handedness). 2) I will conduct empirical studies covering a greater range of inter- and extraclausal factors (e.g., CL placement, argument type, phrase type, CL type, and focus) governing the choice between competing placement options, while those not covered (if applicable) will be kept constant (disentanglement). 3) Data collection procedures will involve three main sources: corpora, and psycholinguistic and prosodic experiments (triangulation of methods to ensure robust results). 4) I will collect empirical prosodic evidence to study competing CL placement possibilities at the left edge of the main clause in contemporary standard Croatian (novelty). 5) Following standards set by Kolaković et al. (2022), the planned studies bridge the findings of normative and theoretical studies (irrespective of their theoretical background) for better experimental designs and more objective language analysis (neutrality). On the one hand, these new empirical perspectives (inclusion and disentanglement of various inter- and extraclausal factors) on the well-known problem and the robust empirically obtained results can feed into theoretical discussions of sentence analysis and word order. On the other hand, the substantially expanded empirical base will provide fine-grained data on variation in CL placement and provide variationists and sociolinguists with a more multifaceted understanding of the driving forces behind the phenomenon. |