Valency patterns of manner of speaking verbs in Croatian

Abstract Manner of speaking verbs denote the transfer of a message through speech, emphasizing the volume, intensity, comprehensibility, psychophysical condition of the speaker, and/or the impression that the speaker leaves on the hearer. In this article, verbs are semantically divided into four subclasses: 1. Verbs with emphasis on volume, 2. verbs of incomprehensible speaking, 3. verbs of meaningless speaking and complaining, and 4. verbs with emphasis on emotional component. Their syntactic peculiarities have been extensively researched in English, while no special attention has been paid to these verbs in Croatian. It is stated that in Croatian they are monovalent verbs. However, these verbs can be bivalent, and even trivalent. The recipient can be expressed by a dative complement within all four semantic subclasses. With the verbs of loud speaking and verbs with negative emotions, it can be expressed by a prepositional complement na ‘at’ + accusative and za ‘after’ + instrumental. The theme can be expressed by a quotation and a clausal complement, a prepositional complement o ‘about’ + locative, an accusative complement, sometimes a prepositional complement protiv ‘against’ + genitive, za ‘for’ + accusative, and with fewer verbs with prepositional phrases za ‘for’ + instrumental or nad ‘over’ + instrumental. Interestingly, there are certain restrictions for the complements’ combination within the same clause, which are described in more detail in the article.