Eine korpuslinguistische Studie zum Gebrauch der Adjektivdeklination im Bosnischen/Serbischen/Kroatischen

Björn Hansen

“A corpus linguistic study of the use of the adjective declension in Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian”

This article deals with the use of the so called definite and indefinite adjective in Bosnian/ Serbian/ Croatian. These forms are usually held to express identifiability of the referents in the universe of discourse, i. e. definiteness of the modified noun. The author examines the actual use on the basis of a corpus linguistic study. The data is taken from the on-line accessible "Oslo Corpus of Bosnian texts". It turns out that the use of the adjective declension can not be explained by one single function, but is based on morphological, lexical and syntactic factors. The short form is quite consistently used with adjectives in predicate position, whereas it shows a certain degree of irregularity in the area of non-referential use. An even higher degree of irregularity is revealed with nouns having specific reference. These date reveal considerable discrepancies between the codified norms and the actual use.

Linguistische Beiträge zur Slavistik. XI. JungslavistInnen-Treffen Cambridge 2002. Hg. Björn Hansen. München: Sagner 2004 (= Specimina Philologiae Slavicae 140), 31–44.