Južnoslovenski Filolog (Jan 2015)
Asyndetic sentences with a concretiser
Abstract
The paper discusses asyndetic sentences, compound sentences without a conjunction between the clauses. Slavic scholars pay considerable attention to these sentences. They predominantly consider asyndetic sentences to be a model of compound sentences, apart from the model of compound conjunctional sentences, and plead that they should be described separately. Asyndetic sentences in contemporary Serbian have not been studied sufficiently. There are few specific papers dedicated to asyndetic sentences, and one can say that there are virtually no papers giving them an in-depth treatment. Therefore, we are so far left without a full insight into how widespread that compound sentence model is in contemporary Serbian and in what variants it occurs, not to mention our even lesser knowledge of its distribution in certain functional styles. This paper describes one type of asyndetic sentences in the contemporary Standard Serbian language. It includes such sentences that have a word or a phrase functioning as the verifier of the semantic relation between the clauses of asyndetic sentences. The paper demonstrates that such sentences take up a sizeable portion of the asyndetic sentence corpus, and that a large number of concretisers occur functioning as the verifiers of different meanings which are established between the clauses. The concretisers, similarly to conjunctions in syndetic sentences, serve the purpose of reducing the typical polysemy of asyndetic sentences to monosemy by assigning a monosemic relation between the clauses while foregrounding one of the possible meanings, and suppressing the others. The paper indicates that coordinate asyndetic sentences express a number of different semantic relations between the clauses. Some of them are expressed in complex sentences, some in compound sentences, and there are also those that can be expressed in both types of conjunctional sentences. The paper presents examples of sentences which have in their second clauses concretisers with conclusive, exclusive, temporal, adversative, causal, concessive, manner, spatial, gradational, respective and explanatory meanings. An array of subtypes occur within some of the types, depending on what semantic relation between the clauses is assigned by the concretisers. Finally, it is woth noting that this paper has more consistently solved the problem of exclusive and conclusive clauses as well. It is not well founded to place them among compound sentences because those sentences have their own conjunctions, whereas these are without conjunctions; it is also not well founded to classify them within some types of compound sentences because some of their classes stand out on account of characteristical conjunctions. Conclusive and exclusive clauses, as the paper demonstrates, are two types of asyndetic sentences with concretisers, the kind better represented in Serbian and which, in their entirety, are a model of asyndetic sentences. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 178021: Opis i standardizacija savremenog srpskog jezika]
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