The Placement of Functional Words

Abstract

The paper focuses on placement of functional words, primarily pronouns and adverbs (interrogative and relational), particles and conjunctions, in complex or coordinated sentences. These words connect coordinated clauses into complex coordinated and subordinated sentences (conjunctions and subjunctions) or connect sentences at the textual level (connectors). Their purpose is also to express various modal meanings, or mark interrogatives, emphasise, entice, negate, etc. Such words are divided into two groups depending on whether they can also function as members of the sentence structure (pronouns) or not (other means of linking and particles). Words belonging to the latter group could (at least from the syntactic perspective) be termed functional in the narrower sense. Special attention will be given to the placement of the following functional/linking words: koji, čiji, i, ni, niti, a, ali, ili, što, samo što, da, zar, zar da, kao da. Placement of functional words (pronouns) in situations in which these words appear in functions that mutually collide, such as cases where the functional word functions as a subjunction and an attribute that does not agree with the noun with respect to the case (e.g. To su pravila primjena kojih zahtijeva punu koncentraciju., that is, To su pravila kojih primjena zahtijeva punu koncentraciju.) will also be discussed.

Keywords

• word order
• functional words
• pronouns
• adverbs
• particles
• conjunctions