Historical Context of Selected Collocations in the Croatian Language

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to present the analysis of selected verb-noun collocations with the node ‘odluka’ – ‘decision’. The analysis was conducted on the basis of the 19th century newspaper articles published in Croatian newspapers from the period 1850–1899, collected in a digitalised format on the Stare hrvatske novine website. Historical forms are compared with the modern ones, excerpted from the HrWac Croatian language corpus. The second part of the 19th century is the time when Standard Croatian was being formed and the press was flourishing. This gave rise to the creation of the journalistic style which, alongside the administrative one, is believed to contain the greatest number of collocations, hence the choice of those two sources of data. The analysis of historical and modern forms has shown that there exist grammatical, orthographic, contextual, semantic and formal differences and these do not hinder the understanding of the text. The differences are negligent and stem from the evolution of the Croatian language, especially the shaping of the norm of the standard language.

Keywords

• history of croatian grammar
• 19th century
• history of collocations in croatian language
• collocations in modern croatian language