Journal of Slavic Linguistics

Pseudo-relative clauses and "Pseudo" pseudo-relative clauses

2024-09-23T16:42:59+00:00

Abstract. This paper discusses relative clauses in Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin and Bulgarian, with some comparisons to English and French. It adopts much of the terminology used in the book (Mel'čuk 2021), including governor and image, and discusses differences in relativizer that arise when the governor is a noun vs. when it is certain kinds of non-noun; it connects these differences with different behavior of anaphoric pronouns. The paper nevertheless argues for maintaining the term pseudo-relative in its older meaning (the French type Le voilà qui arrive 'Here he is arriving') rather than Mel'čuk's usage to mean a relative construction that seems to have no expressed governor/antecedent.

Case contingency of Macedonian cliticization

2026-01-13T07:46:21+00:00

This paper analyzes patterns of cliticization in Macedonian. Macedonian is one of the two Slavic languages with verb-adjacent cliticization, the other one being Bulgarian. Like Bulgarian, Macedonian requires clitics to adjoin to verbal hosts. However, there are contexts in which the adjunction is not possible. This paper demonstrates that these environments involve hosts that do not have case-assigning properties. Moreover, this paper examines some other properties of Macedonian clitics, showing that in certain contexts they display characteristics of weak pronouns and verbal affixes, unexpectedly resembling certain properties of Polish cliticization.

Slovenian clitics prefer to cliticize to the right

2026-05-15T14:14:57+00:00

Slovenian second-position clausal clitics are typically described as being either enclitic by default (Golden and Milojević Sheppard 2000) or prosodically neutral (Bošković 2001). However, Orešnik (1984) argues that they are usually proclitic. This paper presents an experiment testing this description. Subjects were presented a series of sentences with an added beep in various positions in the vicinity of these clitics and asked to identify the location where they perceived the beep. The results confirm previous descriptions that clitics can attach in either direction if needed, but suggest that by default, Slovenian clitics are perceived as proclitic, attaching to the word following them, supporting the claims of Orešnik (1984).