Remarks on Slovene clitic sequences

Abstract

Clitic sequencing in Slovene is mainly the ordering of clitic forms of the personal pronouns, which are usually bound to the second topological position in the Slovene sentence. This ordering corresponds to the type of sequence described by Wackernagel (1892) for the Indo-European languages in general. The first normative description of the inner syntax of Slovene clitic sequences was published by Škrabec (1895). His description was borrowed by Breznik (1916) and became part of the tradition of Slovene grammars that was continued by Toporišič in the second half of the twentieth century with his Slovene Grammar (Slovenska slovnica). Although Slovenska slovnica by Toporišič is regarded as a normative work, the interpretation that clitic combinations not listed in the work were, therefore, forbidden is at least questionable because Toporišič does not make this claim. In an examination of publicly available contemporary text corpora, we found a number of clitic combinations that are not covered by the grammar. Besides other combinations not mentioned in the grammar, we found mainly doubled accusatives, which occur for various reasons. For example, some tri-valent verbs take two accusatives instead of one accusative and one genitive, which is also a matter of historical change as with the verb učiti se ‘to learn.’ Interesting sequencing also occurs in sentences containing a finite and an infinite verb describing a complex event, e.g. ‘I see her carrying her daughter’ -> ‘I see her carrying her.’ Regarding this topic, linguistic variation is of great importance as the measure of acceptance might depend on dialectal and historical factors as well as on the degree of interactivity (spoken vs. written language, etc.) and genre. The examples listed in this article were presented to academic teachers of Slovene studies asking them for their opinion regarding the register of each sentence. Their comments and some additional analysis for every example are listed in this paper. As expected, there was no uniform opinion among them, which is another argument for additional research on Slovene sociolinguistics as well as on the clitic sequence in particular.