Verbal collocations in the administrative functional style

Abstract

The administrative functional style is one of the five styles of the Croatian standard language, which is described in detail in Croatian linguistic literature (Kovačević i Badurina 2001, Silić 2006, Frančić i dr. 2005, Coca-Colin priručnik 2011, Turk 2013). The administrative style includes both legislative and prescriptive texts (law, judiciary, diplomacy, public services) with different text forms (laws, regulations, ordinances, certificates, decisions, applications, reports, CVs). The language of such texts is based on the use of nominal and verbal collocations. The verbal collocations in relation to nominal collocations are much less described in Croatian literature (Petrović 2007/2008). In this paper, emphasis will be placed on the analysis of frequent verbal collocations in the administrative style (stupiti na snagu ‘come into force’, odstupiti s dužnosti ‘to step down’, provesti zakon ‘to pass a law’, obnašati dužnost ‘perform the duties’, poništiti odluku ‘to annul the decision’, preuzeti dužnost ‘to take office’, preuzeti odgovornost ‘to take responsibility’, održati sjednicu ‘hold a meeting’). According to the corpus and the administrative and legal texts (hrWaC, Narodne novine, Propisi.hr, Zakon.hr), it will be described syntactically potential of verbal components in verbal collocations. Both grammatical correlation between the components of verbal collocations (valency) and periphrastic potential of verbs will be taken into consideration. The intention is to observe communicative and pragmatic dimensions of verbal collocations. Finally, we will discuss the possibility of replacing the verb collocation with a single verb and also the normative status of verbal collocations in Croatian will be analyzed.

Keywords

• administrative style
• Croatian
• verbal collocations