Adjective Position in Noun Phrases in the Croatian Church Slavonic Language

Abstract

In Croatian Church Slavonic postposition of adjectives is considered to be less marked than anteposition. Its occurence is a result of the influence of the languages from which the texts were translated (Greek and Latin). Thus, the aim of this research, which was based on the attestations from the corpus of the Dictionary of The Croatian Redaction of the Church Slavonic language, was to detect the factors that determine the use of the anteposition. The research focused on the cases that differ from the Greek and Latin patterns, as these cases are more informative. The following factors were taken into consideration: adjectival aspect (short and long forms of adjectives), meaning of adjective, established phrases (names, terms), phrases with more than one adjective, phrasesplitting, attribute coordination, relation to the other parts of the sentence structure, parallel structures, stylistic factor. The research has shown that the factors with the highest ability of conditioning the anteposition of adjectives in the noun phrase are further emphasis of adjectives and terminologizational factor.

Keywords

• word order
• noun phrase
• adjectives
• Croatian Church Slavonic language