Frozen accusative forms in Croatian

Abstract

In this paper the author analyzes nouns which are used to determine measure (such as stotinu, tisuću, godinu, tjedan…). They usually come in a frozen form, formally accusative, although syntactic rules require another form. The loss of declension is old phenomenon for numerals like stotinu, tisuću but they have also developed a new meaning – ‘a lot’, which should be taken into consideration. They have the syntactic function of quantifiers. Frozen forms like godinu, tjedan... should also be described as quantifiers since they are very common in that frozen accusative form.

Keywords

• frozen accusative
• the meaning of measure
• nouns
• adverbs
• numerals
• quantifiers