Correlations between apophonic patterns and grammatical aspect in Croatian language

Abstract

The paper explores the grammatical function of apophony by focusing on the derivation of aspectual verb pairs in the Croatian language. From a theoretical perspective, this paper belongs to an area of dispute between authors from two contrary currents of thought. The first set of authors view apophonic phenomena as random, e.g. inherently irregular, while the other set believes that at least some examples of apophony can be constrained by rules, and thereby plausibly described. This paper accepts the latter of these two points of view. To this end, a classification of apophonic patterns is conducted between aspectual verb pairs, and a rule of apophonic elevation is derived on the basis of the systematicity of these patterns, while apophonic vowels are described as morphonemes and functional types.

Keywords

• apophony
• grammatical aspect
• aspectual pairs
• morphoneme
• functional type