Cliticization of Serbian Personal Pronouns and Auxiliary Verbs. A Dependency-Based Account

Abstract

The paper looks into cliticization of Serbian personal pronouns and auxiliary verbs. Cliticization is the operation whereby, in the process of clause construction, a clitic (= unstressed) form of a pronominal/verbal lexeme is chosen, rather than a full (= stressed) form. Cliticization of both pronouns and auxiliaries is obligatory under neutral communicative conditions (i.e., in the absence of contrast or emphasis) and unless specific syntactic/prosodic factors impose the choice of a full form. Under marked communicative conditions, cliticization is precluded. Corresponding rules are proposed within a Meaning-Text dependency framework. 1 Overview of the Problem Personal pronouns and auxiliary verbs in Serbian (and all other languages stemming from former Serbo-Croatian) have both full (= stressed, tonic) and clitic (= unstressed) forms, the latter being so-called second-position clitics (Halpern & Zwicky, eds, 1996). In any sentence featuring pronouns and/or auxiliaries, the choice between full and clitic forms is obligatory, which means that the opposition “tonic ~ clitic” is inflectional in nature. The operation whereby the inflectional value (= a grammeme) CLITIC is assigned to a lexical item, in the course of clause synthesis, is called cliticization. Roughly speaking, cliticization of both personal pronouns and auxiliary verbs is obligatory under neutral communicative conditions (i.e., in the absence of contrast or emphasis) and unless specific syntactic/prosodic factors impose the choice of a full form. Under marked communicative conditions, cliticization is precluded. It is precisely these conditions that the paper intends to specify. Here are some preliminary examples of the use of clitic vs. full pronominal and verbal forms; as most examples in the paper, these are taken from the Serbian corpus (Korpus savremenog srpskog jezika: www.korpus.matf.bg.ac.rs). (1) a. Možda me je Mira podsticala na brbljivost. Gledala me je netremice ... lit. ‘Maybe me is Mira having.incited on volubililty. [She] having.looked me is intently...’ ‘Maybe Mira was inciting my volubility. She was looking at me intently...’ b. No, bilo kako bilo, prepoznao ga jeste. lit. ‘But, be it as it may, having.recognised him [he] is.’ ‘But, be it as it may, he did recognize him.’ c. Ali nije gledala njega, gledala je mene. lit. ‘But [she] is.not having.looked him, having.looked [she] is me.’ ‘But she wasn’t looking at him, she was looking at me.’ Example (1a) illustrates a communicatively unmarked context, where clitic forms are used by default and the corresponding full forms would be inappropriate; we see here instances of the accusative 1p pronominal clitic, me ‘me’, and the 3sg past tense auxiliary clitic, je ‘is’. In sentence (1b), a full form of the past tense auxiliary is used contrastively—to insist that the fact of recognizing did take place; note also a marked word order, with the auxiliary clausefinal. The corresponding clitic auxiliary is possible here if the contrast is expressed lexically: [...] zaista ga je 1 The term cliticization has at least another two usages that I do not subscribe to: 1) a diachronic process of becoming a clitic; 2) the operation of attachment of a clitic to its host. prepoznao ‘[...] really him is [he] having.recognized’. Finally, the use of full personal pronouns njega ‘him’ and mene ‘me’ in sentence (1c) is warranted by the contrastive focus they bear; in this type of context clitic forms are excluded. While some other aspects of clitic behavior, in particular their linear placement, have been extensively researched, cliticization (in the sense intended here) has received less attention. Kayne (1975) is a seminal study of cliticization in French, which has served as a springboard for work on this phenomenon in other languages. A discussion of cliticization in Slavic languages can be found, for instance, in Dimitrova-Vulčanova (1999) and Franks (1998 and 2010); the most complete existing account of the cliticization in Serbian/Croatian is the one in Browne (1975: 276-282). Some aspects of the problem were addressed in Progovac (2005: 126-136), Mrazovac, 2009: 364-366), and (in a different perspective) Caink 2000; Peti-Stantić (2017 and 2018) reports on some recent research on the topic on Croatian data. Cliticization is theoretically interesting because it involves the interplay of the syntactic and communicative (a.k.a. information) structures in sentence production and is linked to other important phenomena such as subject ellipsis and conjunction reduction. In the remaining part of this Section, I provide some basic facts about Serbian lexical items susceptible of undergoing cliticization (1.1) and describe the essentials of the theoretical framework adopted (1.2). Conditions under which the cliticization of personal pronouns and auxiliaries occurs are informally characterized in Section 2; their formal description, in terms of rules belonging to a Meaning-Text linguistic model, is offered in Section 3; Section 4 is reserved for a conclusion. 1.1 Full and clitic forms of personal pronouns and auxiliaries As indicated above, cliticizable lexical items in Serbian include personal pronouns and auxiliary verbs. The paradigms of three personal pronouns and two auxiliary verbs follow; the stressed vowel (in the full forms) is boldfaced; tonal accents are not shown. JA ‘I’ ON ‘he’ VI you [PL] ’ BITI ‘be’ in the present, past tense aux. TONIC CLITIC TONIC CLITIC TONIC CLITIC SG PL NOM ja –––– on ––– vi ––– TONIC CLITIC TONIC CLITIC ACC/GEN mene me njega ga vas vas 1 jesam sam jesmo smo DAT meni mi njemu mu vama vam 2 jesi si jeste ste INSTR mnom(e) ––– njim(e) –– vama ––– 3 jeste je jesu su LOC meni ––– njemu ––– vama ––– HTETI lit. ‘want’ in the present, future tense aux. VOC ––– ––– ––– ––– vi ––– 1 hoću ću hoćemo ćemo 2 hoćeš ćeš hoćete ćete 3 hoće će hoće će Table 1: Full and clitic forms of some personal pronouns and auxiliary verbs Pronominal clitic forms exist in the accusative, genitive and dative. The nominative, i.e., subject, pronouns are never cliticized; they are dropped in neutral communicative conditions (Serbian is a PRO-Drop language). Oblique case personal pronouns, whether full or clitic, function as objects of verbs, nouns and adjectives. The auxiliary BITI ‘be’ has the forms identical to that of the copula and the locative verbs; all three verbs exhibit identical behavior with respect to cliticization and linear placement. A finite auxiliary, whether full or clitic, is the head of its clause (Milićević, 2009b) and the top node of the corresponding dependency tree (see immediately below). 1.2 The Framework Within a Meaning-Text linguistic model, a semantically-driven, dependency-based, synthesis-oriented stratificational model (Mel’čuk, 2016: 41-85), cliticization happens in the transition between the Surface-Syntactic Representation [SSyntR] and the Deep-Morphological Representation [DMorphR] of a clause. Formally, the basic structure of the SSyntR is a (linearly non-ordered) dependency tree; that of the DMorphR is a (fully ordered) string. 2 In addition, the interrogative conjunction DA LI has a clitic form, LIINTERR (homophonous with the emphatic particle LIEMPHATIC, with no corresponding full form); it will not be considered in this paper. 3 There is a third auxiliary, BITI in the aorist tense, used to construct the conditional mood forms; it is currently undergoing grammaticalization and becoming a particle, just like its cognate in Russian. Cliticization is part of the operation of morphologization, whereby lexemes in the SSyntS are assigned syntactic inflectional values. Two other major operations—linearization and prosodization of the SSyntS—are part of this transition, which is guided in an essential way by the communicative structure (Mel’čuk, 2001) of the clause under synthesis. During linearization, all lexemes of the clause that have been assigned the grammeme CLITIC (including auxiliary verbs) are gathered in a clitic cluster and linearly positioned together, according to special linearization rules (Milićević, 2009a)—not with respect to their governors, but with respect to a host. The clitics are by default positioned after the first available host, which means that they often “land” clause-second (whence their name). Full pronominal forms obey the same linearization rules as full-fledged nominal complements; their linear positioning is normal in that it is done taking their governor(s) as the reference point. A full finite auxiliary is the reference point for the linearization of all other clause elements, just as a finite lexical verb is. Since our dependency trees are not linearly ordered, for two (or more) clauses containing items that differ only along the “tonic ~ clitic” opposition, the basic dependency structures are identical; their respective communicative structures are different, and so are, of course, their DMorphSs. As an illustration, the corresponding structures for sentences in (2) are given in Figure 1; an underlying question [in square brackets] is supplied for each sentence, providing a minimal communicative context in which it can felicitously be uttered. (2) a. [Did you tell him?] Rekao sam mu. ‘Having.told [I] am to.him.’ = ‘I told him.’ b. [Who did you tell?] Rekao sam njemu. ‘To.him [I] am having.told.’ = ‘It’s to him that I told.’ c. [Why didn’t you tell him?] Jesam mu rekao. ‘[I] am to.him having.told.’ = ‘I did tell him.’