The Origin of the Wackernagel Effect in Serbo-Croatian
Louis-H Desouvrey
March 2021 

This paper aims to unravel the syntax of Serbo-Croatian clitics, which tend to cluster in the second position of the sentence (Wackernagel's Law). It is shown that this phenomenon rises from a morphological peculiarity of the auxiliary verbs in that their conjugation consists of a compound of two morphemes, one of which shows a floating melody, i.e. not associated to the skeleton. Then either a default rule associating the melody to the skeleton takes place in the morphology, in which case the full form surfaces, or else the auxiliary compound enters the syntax, where the floating melody must be eliminated. This is realized by the mandatory adjunction of the auxiliary to a suitable element. By virtue of the temporal adjunction, the deficient morpheme, which is not in the path of the linearization process, is filtered out as stray. As a result, one morpheme surfaces as a clitic. This analysis obviously predicts that both the third person clitic je, and the reflexive se, which carry the deficient morpheme on their right side (jeste, sebe) must postpone their placement at the end of the cluster, for whatever material adjoined to them will anchor to the stray morpheme and will disappear with it at the end of the derivation. This morphological peculiarity, together with the widespread specification of the feature ω (which may induce a superiority effect) in various paradigms, accounts for the complexities observed in this language. SC offers a new insight on the role of the adjunction and the subsequent linearization process, which turns out to be much more than a simple pronunciation protocol between the grammar and the oral modality.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005586 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Draft
keywords:	syntactic features, constraints, vectors, operators, adjunction, skeleton, directionality, word order, coreference, pronoun, anaphor, morphology, phonology, syntax.
previous versions:	v1 [November 2020]
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