ENKLITIKE NAKON POČETNE SINTAGME U SUVREMENOM PISANOM HRVATSKOM

KODIFIKACIJA I UPORABA

Abstract

Although enclitics in contemporary written Croatian are often placed immediately af¬ter an initial phrase, e.g. Njezin prijatelj je stigao kući (‘Her friend has come home.’), codification reference books generally proscribe this position and prescribe phrase splitting, e.g. Njezin je prijatelj stigao kući, or delayed placement of enclitics, e.g. Njezin prijatelj stigao je kući. Based on research conducted on a corpus of unedited scholarly texts containing about 180,000 words, the paper describes actual tendencies in the placement of enclitics in sentences with an initial phrase in contemporary written Croatian and presents recommendations for codification. Delayed placement clearly dominates in the corpus, with enclitics most often choosing the first word to the right of the initial phrase which independently forms a sentence component as their host. In most cases this is the predicate, although predicate is usually not a host if it is at the very end of the sentence. The position immediately after the phrase is significantly more frequent than phrase splitting, which is common only in phrases composed of a pronoun (more rarely also an adjective) and a noun and in the case of particles modi¬fying a sentence component, while in phrases with different composition it is frequent only if they have the role of the nominal part of the predicate. Phrases are significantly more frequently split by independent enclitics than by enclitic clusters. Some of the observed tendencies were confirmed as statistically significant by the application of the chi-square test, while those for which the application of the test was not possible were illustrated by means of descriptive statistics. The recommendations for codifica¬tion emphasize delayed placement as the basic and neutral position in contemporary written Croatian, while phrase splitting outside of the above-mentioned cases is relati¬vely rare and marked as bookish. The position immediately after a phrase strongly penetrates written usage and in contemporary Croatian is not marked as substandard, although it can be associated with a lower level of formality.