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Description:
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This comprehensive study of relative clauses in Serbo-Croatian begins with
the selection and description of properties of such relative clauses as are
most frequently realized in various languages, including Serbo-Croatian.
These properties can therefore be considered to belong to typical
representatives of the relative clauses. The author then analyses formal
constituents of the antecedent which determine the realization of the
relative clause as restrictive or non-restrictive. The non-typical relative
clauses (e.g. free relatives, extraposed relatives), the differentiation of
inflected from uninflected relativizer (used with personal pronouns),
adverbial relativizers, and the replacement of the participle by the
relative clause in Serbo-Croatian are also described in this study. The
corpus composed of texts from the journalistic, bookish,
administrative-legal, and scientific styles has shown that several
interesting on-going changes can be perceived with regard to the most
typical relative pronoun in Serbo-Croatian. One of them is the extension of
the animate masculine into the inanimate (and increasingly into the neuter)
of the pronoun as a means of morphologically disambiguating the subject and
object. The other change concerns the possessive genitive of the pronoun.
The study is supplied with examples, charts, and an extensive bibliography.
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