The Placement of Clitics in Serbo-Croatian

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: gut (2,0), Free University of Berlin (JFK Institut für Nordamerikastudien), course: Parameters: typology and variation, 5 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This paper is offers a short overview of the basic evidence on clitics in Serbian/Croatian. Serbian/Croatian is a language with a virtualy free word order due to ist rich morphological heritage in form of inflections for case, gender and tense marking. In this paper, I am basically concerned with a major exception to this general rule- the position of clitics. Serbo-Croat (nowdays formally divided into three standard languages Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian) has a rich system of clitic forms, including Dative and Accusative pronominal clitics; verbal clitics; which are unstressed forms of finite auxiliary verbs; and the interrogative marker 'li'. On the course of this paper I will confront some opposing paradigmas on the rules underlying the structural positon of clitics within the syntax of Serbian/Croatian. .