Conjunctive and prepositional comparatives in Slovenian

english
slovenian

2010

volume 50, issue 3

Slovene    syntax 

Univerza v Ljubljani, Filozofska fakulteta
(Obvezni izvod spletne publikacije)

The paper deals with the distribution of conjunctive and prepositional comparative structures in Slovenian. They are introduced by the complementiser kot and the preposition od, respectively. Comparative structures are categorised along three dimensions: (i) the morphological environment of the comparative morpheme (yielding amount and quality comparatives); (ii) the syntactic environment of the comparative morpheme (eight syntactic environments are discussed: (nominative) subject, (accusative) direct object, (dative) indirect object, prepositional object, locative adverbial, temporal adverbial, some other adverbial, and predicate); (iii) the syntactic environment (the same environments as above are discussed) of the associate (the non-elided phrase in the comparative complement is the remnant; its counterpart with the same grammatical function in the matrix clause is the associate). The comparison of conjunctive and prepositional comparatives shows that the distribution of the latter is more restricted and also exhibits more inter-speaker variation than the former. Conjunctive comparatives are acceptable in virtually all combinations of the above-mentioned parameters, the only exception being quality comparatives withan adverbial or predicate associate where the comparative morpheme is embedded in the associate. The only absolute generalisation that can be made about prepositional comparatives is that the associate must be either a subject or a direct object; all other generalisations are merely tendencies.

14.02.2015