Serbo-Croatian Words on the Border Between Lexicon and Grammar

Snjezana Kordic, author of the parallel German and Croatian texts considered here (Worter im Grenzbereich… – Rijeci na granici…), was educated in Osijek and Zagreb and has taught Slavic languages and linguistics at a number of universities in Germany. Her first book (Relativna recenica [1995] – Der Relativsatz im Serbokroatischen [1999]), taken from her doctoral thesis, was a valuable and thorough study of the grammar of relative constructions, drawing theoreticallinguistic inspiration from a number of sources and citing statistical results based on a large representative corpus of early 20th-century Croatian material. In Croatia she is famous, even notorious, outside the strictly linguistic public for numerous articles in the literary journals Republika and Knjizevna republika (many accessible on her Internet Web site ), polemicizing against the idea that there is a separate Croatian (and a separate Serbian and a separate Bosnian) language or even a separate Croatian (vs. Serbian or Bosnian) standard language. The proper measure of how many standards there are, in her reasoning, is mutual intelligibility, and the high degree to which educated Croatians, Serbs, Bosnians, and Montenegrins understand each other is to her a sign that they are using the same standard, for which she finds the name Serbo-Croatian most appropriate.The work under review, published as two independent titles, represents the German and Croatian versions of her University of Munster post-doctoral dissertation (Habilitationsschriff) and shares the virtues of her work on relative clauses, being empirically well supported and making reference to a variety of traditions in linguistics. One is impressed to see, on its pages, apposite quotations from independently developed German, Russian, Polish, Czech, and EnglishAmerican scholarship converging on similar views. The work’s chapters treat a number of frequently encountered words in the language that raise particular problems for Serbo-Croatian studies and even for general linguistics. Because each of the words has its own grammatical behavior, they have fallen between the proverbial cracks, being too grammatical for South Slavic lexicographers to have treated and too lexically bound for previous grammarians. But they are very well worth the attention of Slavists. Most of Kordic’s results indeed can be termed “Serbo-Croatian,” being the same for usage in Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Bosnia; a few that are not will be mentioned below.Chapter 1 treats the first-, second- and third-person pronounsyo, ti, on. Even in a language like Serbo-Croatian, which tends to drop nominative-case subject pronouns when these are unstressed, the personal pronouns are among the most frequently used words. What could be simpler than to define them as referring to the speaker, to the addressee, and to an identifiable non-participant in the conversation? And yet every personal pronoun has uses escaping this characterization (transpositions), as Kordic brings out. Such transpositions are known from other languages as well. Kordic compares them with German, but English parallels can also be found. A doctor or nurse may say first-person plural we to a patient in the meaning ‘you’-“How are we feeling today?”-just as in Serbo-Croatian and German (in Slovene the first-person dual is used). English can use a third for a second person (and simultaneously a second for a third person) as a rhetorical device, as when A reacts to B’s surprising statement by imagining an extra interlocutor and saying “Can you believe he said that?!” First singular for second singular (§ 1.5.1) is also attested in English. In my own household, a family member expresses empathy with our cat’s feelings, saying to him, “Meow! Let me in, it’s cold outside!”In Serbo-Croatian (a point noticed previously only by a few participants in the Yugoslav Serbo-Croatian-English Contrastive Project-see Mihailovic 1970, Browne 1976), a third-person pronoun need not refer to a referentially identifiable non-participant; it can show sameness of sense without sameness of reference