Balcania et Slavia

Studi linguistici | Studies in Linguistics

e-ISSN 2785-3187

Vol. 1 – Num. 1

June 2021

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Edizioni
Ca'Foscari
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e-ISSN 2785-3187

**Balcania et Slavia**

Studi linguistici | Studies in Linguistics

Editors-in-Chief

Iliyana Krapova

Svetlana Nistratova

Luisa Ruvoletto

Giuseppina Turano

**Edizioni Ca' Foscari - Digital Publishing**

Fondazione Università Ca' Foscari

Dorsoduro 3246, 30123 Venezia

URL https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/balcania-et-slavia/
# Balcania et Slavia

## Studi linguistici | Studies in Linguistics

### Semestral journal

**Editors-in-Chief** Iliyana Krapova (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italia) Svetlana Nistratova (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italia) Luisa Ruvoletto (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italia) Giuseppina Turano (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italia)

**Managing Editor** Giuseppe Sofo (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italia)

**Advisory Board** Francesco Altimari (Università della Calabria, Italia) Petya Assenova (University of Sofia, Bulgaria) Rosanna Benacchio (Università degli Studi di Padova, Italia) Stephen M. Dickey (University of Kansas, USA) Steven Franks (Indiana University Bloomington, USA) Victor A. Friedman (The University of Chicago, USA) Lucyna Gebert (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italia) Maxim Anisimovič Krongauz (Russian State University for the Humanities, Russia) Brian Joseph (Ohio State University, USA) Igor Grigorjevič Miloslavsky (Moscow State University, Russia) Vladimir Alexandrovič Plungian (Institute of Linguistics and V.V. Vinogradov Russian Language Institute; Russian Academy of Sciences; Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia) Catherine Rudin (Wayne State College, USA) Alexander Jurijevič Rusakov (St. Petersburg State University, Russia) Andrej Nikolajevič Sobolev (Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia) Hannu Tommola (Tampere University, Finland) Björn Wiemer (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Deutschland)

**Editorial Board** Assia Assenova (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italia) Pavel Duryagin (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italia)

**Head office** Università Ca' Foscari Venezia | Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali Comparati | Ca' Bernardo | Dorsoduro 3199, 30123 Venezia, Italia | balcaniaetslavia@unive.it

**Publisher** Edizioni Ca' Foscari - Digital Publishing | Fondazione Università Ca' Foscari | Dorsoduro 3246, 30123 Venezia, Italia | ecf@unive.it

© 2021 Università Ca' Foscari Venezia

© 2021 Edizioni Ca' Foscari - Digital Publishing for the present edition

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Iliyana Krapova, Svetlana Nistratova,
Luisa Ruvoletto, Giuseppina Turano

5

No Gender in ‘Gender Agreement’:

On Declension Classes and Gender in Serbo-Croatian

Boban Arsenijević

11

It's All Under Control!

On Perfective Present Forms in BCS Main Clauses

Marco Biasio

47

On the Diachrony of the Clitic Cluster in Bulgarian

Tsvetana Dimitrova

67

Postposed Articles
and DP Structures in Torlak

Beatrice Azzolina, Veronica Girolami, Jelena Živojinović

97

Language Ideologies and Multilingual Practices
of Post-Soviet Migrants in Western Europe
from a Translanguaging Perspective

Erzhen Khilkhanova

117

URL https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/it/edizioni/riviste/balcania-et-slavia/2021/1/

DOI http://doi.org/10.30687/BES/0/2021/01

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**Introduction**

Iliyana Krapova

Svetlana Nistratova

Luisa Ruvoletto

Giuseppina Turano

Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italia

*Balcania et Slavia. Studies in linguistics* is published by the Department of Linguistic and Comparative Cultural Studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. The primary goal of the Journal is to bring together original publications in the field of theoretical, areal-typological, contrastive, and diachronic linguistics, which can provide a better understanding of the structure and the history of the Slavic and Balkan languages. In the academic landscape of Italy, the Journal promises to become a unique virtual domain of interdisciplinary research in which the Slavic and the Balkan linguistic areas are put to scrutiny so that they can feed off each other, in both empirical and theoretical terms. As editors, our aim is to publish contributions that bring to light different typological, areal or structural properties of these languages especially if such properties have remained unnoticed in current traditions or even if, however well-known, they call for innovative approaches in order to be better understood and analysed.

Issues of variation and micro-variation will be particularly relevant for the overall subject matter of the Journal because we believe that it is through a comparative description of the variation patterns in the various domains of language that we can gain a deeper view into the comparative grammar of the languages under study. This goes without saying for the well-known multilingualistic and multi-ethnic Balkan area that, due to the tormented Balkan history made of migrations, population mix and failed integrational policies, presents, as many scholars have pointed out, a unique dialectal continuum with patterns of isogloss variation that have not yet received the attention they merit.
The languages of the Balkan Linguistic Union, which comprises Balkan Slavic, Balkan Romance, Greek and Albanian, have come to develop, over the past six or seven centuries, a number of shared grammatical (morphosyntactic) and lexical features currently known as 'Balkan linguistic types'. But, as acknowledged by many scholars, 'Balkan linguistic types' are much more than a random collection of commonly acquired features (loan constructions, calques, syntactic borrowings, etc.) as it is generally the case with contact-induced innovations among two or more neighbouring dialects or languages. Balkanisms are deeply integrated into the structure of some or all Balkan languages, and the specific *Sprachbund* effects they have produced go beyond a simple areal explanation and raise a number of questions that are still open (for discussion, see the collection of articles in Krapova, Joseph 2018): the specific role of contact in bringing about the convergencies, the nature of the convergence itself (grammatical replication, some sort of copying or borrowing of surface structures), the mechanisms of transfer, etc. Another aspect worth exploring is the relation between the Balkan *Sprachbund* and other well-known linguistic areas including Standard Average European (SAE) conceived as a linguistic unity from a broad European perspective (Haspelmath 2001). Old questions relevant for the description of specific Balkan convergencies are also still open for discussion: the degree of Balkanisation of each language spoken in the Balkans; the potential source(s) of each common phenomenon; the number and fate of each Balkanism, in historically reconstructed, as well as in ongoing contact situations. At the current stage of Balkan linguistics, we need to know whether these processes are still going on, in which fields or subfields of grammar, and whether there are significant outcomes of these processes in recent times (see the collection of papers in Sobolev 2021, among many others not cited here for lack of space).

The problem of shared or common linguistic types is particularly relevant also for the Slavic area. A traditional concern in Slavic linguistics has been the issue of divergence in diachronic terms, namely in what ways Slavic languages have evolved in space and time as individual linguistic entities, with some attention also paid to parallel (and non-contact-induced) developments motivated by genetic origin. Recently, however, new perspectives have emerged and have enriched the traditional historic interest, namely those of convergence due to language contact, both intra-Slavic as well as between Slavic and the rest of Europe. There is a renewed interest toward a more profound comparative-typological profile of the Slavic languages in terms of their potential SAE membership, as part of the core or the periphery (see the recent collection of papers in Danylenko, Nomachi 2019). Our Journal seeks to promote original studies aiming at discussing those and similar vitally important issues that will undoubtedly help delineate the Slavic area and define its essential
characteristics in reference to the 'other' Europe. We intend to pub-
lish innovative research on all topics regarding the diffusion of cer-
tain areal properties, grammaticalization in space and time, conserv-
ative and innovative tendencies all of which have contributed in one
way or another to shape the current Slavic landscape.

*Balcania et Slavia* is an online peer-reviewed journal, published annually in two issues and available in open access. For our inaugural volume, we placed a call for papers and we also invited some scholars to submit original contributions that present different methodological approaches to different fields of Slavic and Balkan linguistics: phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics.

Here is a brief synopsis of the papers included in the first issue
and appearing in alphabetical order.

Boban Arsenijević’s paper “No Gender in Gender Agreement: On Declension Classes and Gender in Serbo-croatian” looks into gender agreement in Serbo-Croatian (SC) as a theoretical problem for this language, but also for theories of how agreement mechanisms work in general. The problem posed by SC gender agreement data is that in certain cases two different gender values are triggered by the controlling noun. In the face of these potentially problematic data, the author seeks to disentangle the agreement feature into primitives like [animate] and [human] and proposes a model of how the features compose with each other and interact both with system features (like declension class) as well as with semantic ones. The most important and challenging property of agreement according to the author and his generative-driven approach to the complexities of gender morphology is that gender does not play any role in syntax but gets instantiated only at the level of logical form (LF).

The paper by Marco Biasio “It’s All Under Control! On Perfec-
tive Present Forms in BCS Main Clauses” aims at providing a uni-
fied analysis of the syntax-pragmatics interface of the (allegedly)
anomalous licensing of the perfective present (henceforth Pres<sup>PF</sup>) in
Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian present-tensed main clauses. In Old- and
Neo-Štokavian dialects, Pres<sup>PF</sup> forms cannot refer to eventualities
that are anchored to the utterance time. However, there seem to be
three apparent exceptions to this structural constraint. They com-
prise: 1) *abusive metonymic performatives*, i.e. a closed class of dis-
paraging phrases that figuratively perform on the insulted hearer
the action referred to in the utterance; 2) running commentaries; 3)
contexts featuring the epistemic operator *mòžda* ‘maybe’. Building on
some theoretical tenets advocated by neoperformative hypotheses,
it is claimed in the paper that, for Pres<sup>PF</sup> forms to be licensed in BCS
main clauses, the uninterpretable feature of control needs to be re-
alised as a functional projection in the SpeechActP layer at the lev-
el of the so-called ‘Seat of Knowledge’.
Erzhen Khilkhanova's paper "Language Ideologies and Multilingual Practices of Post-Soviet Migrants from a Translanguaging Perspective" is dedicated to translingualism, which is a popular topic that attracts the attention of linguists in many countries for a number of reasons. Within the Slavic area, the increase of interest is motivated by migration phenomena and issues of resettlement of former Soviet citizens in the West. The paper describes, discusses and analyses multilingual practices of non-Russian migrants from the former Soviet Union whose native language is Russian. The translanguaging perspective uncovers language ideologies underpinning these practices and serving as the main motivation for their replacement with linguistic assimilation despite the rich repertoire of multilingual resources available to these first-generation migrants.

The study also reveals a change of language ideologies of post-Soviet migrants in the more democratic Western European context towards awareness of language equality and increasing symbolic value of languages for ethnic identification.

In their paper, "Postposed Articles and DP Structures in Torlak", Jelena Zivojinović, Beatrice Azzolina and Veronica Girolami investigate the enclitic article in the DP structure of Torlak, a non-standard Balkan Slavic variety spoken in the Southeastern area of Serbia and in the bordering areas of Bulgaria and Macedonia.

Torlak displays both Balkan and non-Balkan features: like Bulgarian and Macedonian, it presents a postposed enclitic article-like element, but, at the same time, it does not exhibit multiple determination, which in Bulgarian and Macedonian is characterised by the presence of a demonstrative and one or more definite article suffixes within the extended projection of the noun.

The authors' proposal is that, while in Macedonian and Bulgarian the articles seem to have undergone a full grammaticalization into purely functional elements and for this reason they are able to occur with a demonstrative in a multiple determination construction, in Torlak instead, the grammaticalization of the determiner is only partially resulting in an inflectional affix that maintains the demonstrative semantics.

Tsvetana Dimitrova's paper "On the Diachrony of the Clitic Cluster in Bulgarian" traces back the formation of the clitic cluster in Bulgarian starting from the Old Church Slavonic through Middle Bulgarian up to the Early Modern Bulgarian and beyond. The author proposes that the clitic cluster is split in two layers – the main layer consists of a (pronominal) core and a (verbal) periphery, while the secondary layer hosts elements that are not strictly clitic but are clitic-like or semi-clitics. The author reviews a number of data in various diachronic corpora and reaches the conclusion that there has been practically no change in the positions of the elements within the core, while the changes that have occurred have interested the
periphery of the cluster and are due not to structural changes but to
changes in the set, i.e. some elements of the pronominal and the aux-
iliary system have been reanalysed while original clitics of the dis-
course type have been lost.

We hope that this Journal will become an open forum for interest-
ing discussions where researchers and experts in the field share their
work, stimulate novel research paths and advance the study on the
various aspects of the Slavic and the Balkan languages.

We are grateful to the members of our Advisory Board for the in-
ternational prestige they confer to the Journal and for their precious
suggestions.

Many thanks go to the Editorial Board members who actively par-
ticipated in the entire process.

We must also highlight the fundamental work done by our review-
ers who are among the most reputable scholars worldwide. They en-
sured a double-blind peer-review process – with two scholars for each
paper – and we would like to thank them all for their efforts and time.

Last but not least, we would like to thank our publisher Edizio-
ni Ca' Foscari, directed by Massimiliano Vianello, for the constant
support. Our special thanks go to Mariateresa Sala for her great ef-
ficiency and invaluable editorial help.

Bibliography

Haspelmath, M. (1998). "How Young in Standard Average European?". *Language Science*, 20(3), 271-87.

Haspelmath, M. (2001). "The European Linguistic Area: Standard Average European". Haspelmath, M.; König, E.; Oesterreichter, W.; Raible, W. (eds), *Language Typology and Language Universals: An International Handbook*, vol 2, 1492-510. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Handbuch zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 20.2.

Danylenko, A.; Nomachi, M. (2019). *Slavic on the Language Map of Europe*. Mouton de Gruyter. Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 333. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110639223.

Krapova, I.; Joseph, B. (2019). *Balkan Syntax and (Universal) Principles of Grammar*. Mouton de Gruyter. Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 285. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110375930.

Sobolev, A. (2021). *Between Separation and Symbiosis. Southeastern European Languages and Cultures in Contact*. Mouton de Gruyter. Language Contact and Bilingualism. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501509254-202.
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# No Gender in ‘Gender Agreement’:
On Declension Classes and Gender
in Serbo-Croatian

Boban Arsenijević

Institute of Slavic Studies, University of Graz, Austria

**Abstract** The present paper argues for a view of gender agreement without either grammatical or natural gender being represented as syntactic features. Rather than deriving declension classes in terms of realisation, I postulate them as the only relevant feature that is lexically specified on the noun. Agreement copies the declension class and triggers presuppositions. When these presuppositions clash with those already active in the discourse, default agreement is realised. The paper moreover provides a quantitative analysis of semantic correlates of declension classes and a novel analysis of SC declension classes.

**Keywords** Declension class. Gender. Agreement. Properties of quantity. Serbo-Croatian.

**Summary** 1 Introduction. – 2 Declension class in terms of realisation. – 3 Basics for a better model of declension classes. – 4 Declension Classes, Gender and Properties of Quantity: A Quantitative Corpus-based Analysis. – 5 The proposal: nouns are specified for declension classes, interpretive effects emerge in pragmatic competition. – 6 The morphology of declension classes. – 7 Conclusion.

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Edizioni
Ca' Foscari

**Peer review**

Submitted 2021-07-20
Accepted 2021-10-15
Published 2020-12-20

**Open access**

© 2021 | ©® Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License

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**Citation** Arsenijević, B. (2021). "No Gender in 'Gender Agreement': On Declension Classes and Gender in Serbo-Croatian". *Balcania et Slavia*, 1(1), 11-46.
# 1 Introduction

Serbo-Croatian (SC) nouns are traditionally divided in four declension classes and three genders (e.g. Stevanović 1989). Declension classes can be designated by a pairing of the nominative and genitive singular ending, for example: class <Ø, a>, class <o/e, a>, class <a, e>, class <Ø, i>. Traditionally, they are referred to by numbers in the given order, as class I, class II, class III and class IV declension, which is also the way I refer to them in this article.<fnref n="1" /> This is illustrated in **table 1** for the nouns mrav 'ant', žig 'stamp' (to illustrate the effect of animacy), more 'sea', selo 'village' (-e comes after soft consonants, -o otherwise), riba 'fish' and noć 'night'.

<table><caption>**Table 1** Declension class and gender in Serbo-Croatian</caption><thead><tr><th rowspan="2"></th><th colspan="2">Class I (&lt;Ø, a&gt;)</th><th colspan="2">Class II (&lt;o/e, a&gt;)</th><th colspan="2">Class III (&lt;a, e&gt;)</th><th colspan="2">Class IV (&lt;Ø, i&gt;)</th></tr><tr><th>Sg</th><th>Pl</th><th>Sg</th><th>Pl</th><th>Sg</th><th>Pl</th><th>Sg</th><th>Pl</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Nom</td><td>mrav-Ø</td><td>mrav-i</td><td>mor-e sel-o</td><td>mor-a</td><td>rib-a</td><td>rib-e</td><td>noć-Ø</td><td>noć-i</td></tr><tr><td>Gen</td><td>mrav-a</td><td>mrav-a</td><td>mor-a</td><td>mor-a</td><td>rib-e</td><td>rib-a</td><td>noć-i</td><td>noć-i</td></tr><tr><td>Dat</td><td>mrav-u</td><td>mrav-ima</td><td>mor-u</td><td>mor-ima</td><td>rib-i</td><td>rib-ama</td><td>noć-i</td><td>noć-ima</td></tr><tr><td>Acc</td><td>mrav-(a)(žig-Ø)</td><td>mrav-e</td><td>mor-e sel-o</td><td>mor-a</td><td>rib-u</td><td>rib-e</td><td>noć-Ø</td><td>noć-i</td></tr><tr><td>Inst</td><td>mrav-em</td><td>mrav-ima</td><td>mor-em sel-om</td><td>mor-ima</td><td>rib-om</td><td>rib-ama</td><td>noć-ju</td><td>noć-ima</td></tr><tr><td>Loc</td><td>mrav-u</td><td>mrav-ima</td><td>mor-u</td><td>mor-ima</td><td>rib-i</td><td>rib-ama</td><td>noć-i</td><td>noć-ima</td></tr></tbody></table>

The relation between SC declension classes and gender has been the subject of numerous investigations.<fnref n="2" /> Grammatical gender stands for the type of agreement a noun triggers on declinable modifiers and predicates, and relies on the assumption that the agreement markers on these items correlate with the declension class of the noun, as well as with the natural gender of the referent, as illustrated in (1). Neither correlation is absolute: a noun can show an agreement pattern that fails to match the natural gender of the referent or the declension class of the controlling noun, but not both (see (1d) for a mismatch with the natural gender).

<footnote n="1">1 Due to a high degree of syncretism, the first and the second class, i.e. classes <Ø, a> and <o, a>, are sometimes taken to be one class, yielding a classification with three classes, one of which has two subclasses.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Stevanović 1989; Corbett 1982; Corbett 1991; Wechsler, Zlatić 2003; Despić 2017; Alsina, Arsenijević 2012a; 2012b; Arsenijević, Gračanin Yuksek 2016; Puškar 2017 among others.</footnote>
(1)

<table><tr><td>a. bel-a</td><td>krava b. bel-i</td><td>bik c. bel-o</td><td>tele d. mlad-a</td><td>gospoda</td></tr><tr><td>white-F</td><td>cow</td><td>white-MASC</td><td>bull</td><td>white-N</td><td>calf</td><td>young-F</td><td>gentlemen</td></tr><tr><td>'white cow'</td><td>'white cow'</td><td>'white calf'</td><td>'white calf'</td><td>'young gentlemen'</td></tr></table>

Inanimate nouns are orthogonal to gender, and their agreement is fully predictable from their declension class: class I nouns trigger masculine agreement, class II nouns neuter, class III and IV nouns feminine. Furthermore, considering animate nouns, class I includes only masculine members (i.e. only nouns that denote male or gender-unspecified individuals), class II only neuter (i.e. those referring to offspring, which is arguably conceptualised as genderless), class IV takes no animates at all.<fnref n="3" /> This all suggests that gender could be eliminated from the system, by modelling agreement purely in terms of declension class: masculine gender agreement is class I agreement, neuter is class II, feminine class III and IV. The ground for relying on gender comes from the so-called hybrid gender agreement nouns, such as class III nouns triggering masculine agreement in singular as in (2), where the agreement in the singular is not the one indicated by the declension class, but arguably associated with the gender of the referents (Corbett 1991; Aronoff 1994).

(2)

<table><tr><td>moj-Ø</td><td>ded-a</td><td>prv-i</td><td>komšij-a</td><td>mlad-Ø</td><td>delij-a</td></tr><tr><td>my-MASC</td><td>grandpa-III.NOM.SG</td><td>first-MASC</td><td>neighbour-III.NOM.SG</td><td>young-MASC</td><td>dude-III.NOM.SG</td></tr><tr><td>'my grandpa'</td><td>'neighbour next door'</td><td>'young dude'</td><td>'neighbour next door'</td><td>'young dude'</td><td>'young dude'</td></tr><tr><td>moj-e</td><td>ded-e</td><td>prv-e</td><td>komšij-e</td><td>mlad-e</td><td>delij-e</td></tr><tr><td>my-FEM.PL</td><td>grandpa-III.NOM.PL</td><td>first-MASC.PL</td><td>neighbour-III.NOM.PL</td><td>young-MASC.PL</td><td>dude-III.NOM.PL</td></tr><tr><td>'my grandpas'</td><td>'neighbours next door'</td><td>'young guys'</td><td>'young guys'</td><td>'young guys'</td><td>'young guys'</td></tr></table>

This step, however, introduces the question of the division of work between the two sources of information. Is agreement determined by the declension class, unless it clashes with gender, or is it determined by gender, unless a noun lacks it – in which case declension class jumps in? Or do actually all nouns, animate or not, have a gender feature, which remains uninterpreted in inanimates?

Before going deeper with the discussion, let me address some apparent exceptions to the generalisations above about the gender – de-

<footnote n="3">³ Prescriptive grammars mention nouns *kći* 'daughter' and *mati* 'mother' as class IV animates but, in most present day spoken varieties of SC, these nouns have migrated to class III, with a more or less changed shape.</footnote>
declension class mapping, pointed by an anonymous reviewer. One pattern is that exhibited by two types of nouns which show endings that formally may be attributed to class II, but trigger the traditional masculine agreement. The first group are animate nouns, including proper names and derived nouns (mostly with the suffix -ko for expressive nouns denoting property bearers), as illustrated in (3).

(3)

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>a. Jan-k-o</th><th>b. Per-o</th><th>c. prljav-k-o</th><th>d. rumen-k-o</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td></td><td>Jan-SUFF-?.NOM.SG<br>'Janko'</td><td>Per-?.NOM.SG<br>'Pero'</td><td>dirty-SUFF-?.NOM.SG<br>'dirty little one'</td><td>ruddy-SUFF-?.NOM.SG<br>'ruddy little one'</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Jan-k-a<br>Jan-SUFF-?.ACC.SG<br>'Janko'</td><td>Per-a<br>Per-?.ACC.SG<br>'Pero'</td><td>prljav-k-a<br>dirty-SUFF-?.ACC.SG<br>'dirty little one'</td><td>rumen-k-a<br>ruddy-SUFF-?.ACC.SG<br>'ruddy little one'</td></tr></tbody></table>

In spite of sharing some endings with class II, these nouns rather belong to class I, since their accusative case in singular takes the ending as in class I rather than being syncretic with the nominative – as characteristic of class II nouns (see table 1). The ending -o in the nominative singular can be explained on a phonological ground, in the interaction of prosody and stem-final consonant clusters. In favour of the view that these nouns have an exceptional nominative singular, but otherwise belong to class I, speaks also the fact that for a subset of these nouns (those like the name *Pero* or the common noun *medo* 'little bear') in some varieties, people share the nominative singular in -o, but otherwise decline them in class III.

Two properties of the nouns in (3), however, point in the direction of class II. One is that they cannot have plural forms, which is a property they share with uncontroversial animate class II nouns (Arsenijević 2017). The other is that they have a hypocoristic, hence expressive meaning and, as discussed in § 5, expressive meanings are a type of markedness that triggers the assignment of declension classes of a higher degree of markedness (especially class II and III). The difference between the nominative and the accusative (not attested in uncontroversial class II animates) would then be an argument in favour of a realisational nature of declension classes. Still, this would not be in clash with the main thesis of this article: that grammatical gender is a derivative of declension classes and not vice versa. If declension classes too are derivatives of lexical semantic properties of the bases (i.e. of roots or complex structures), in particular properties of quantity, natural gender and expressiveness, this is a further step in theoretical reduction.
The second group are borrowed nouns ending in -o or -e, some of which are inanimate and therefore cannot be tested for the accusative singular, as in (4a-b) (in inanimate class I nouns, this form is syncretic with the nominative, just like in class II nouns). Still, looking at the animate among these nouns, as in (4c-d), they do show the class I pattern in the accusative (that they belong to the same class is confirmed by sharing the same pattern with accented final syllables, as in (4b, d); moreover, accented final syllables are not attested in class II). Furthermore, for most speakers, the nominative plural ending for all these nouns is the one of class I. While there are some speakers that prefer the class II ending, importantly, most of them also prefer the neuter agreement for these nouns, indicating that in their grammar they belong to class II.

(4)

<table><thead><tr><th>a. radi-o</th><th>b. kabar-è</th><th>c. impresari-o</th><th>d. krupij-è</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>radio-?.NOM.SG<br>'radio'</td><td>cabaret-?.NOM.SG<br>'cabaret'</td><td>impresario-?.NOM.SG<br>'impresario'</td><td>croupier-?.NOM.SG<br>'croupier'</td></tr><tr><td>radi-a<br>radio-?.ACC.SG<br>'radio'</td><td>kabar-è<br>cabaret-?.ACC.SG<br>'cabaret'</td><td>impresari-a<br>impresario-?.ACC.SG<br>'impresario'</td><td>krupijè -<sup>*</sup><br>croupier-?.ACC.SG<br>'croupier'</td></tr><tr><td>radi-i<br>radio-?.NOM.PL<br>'radio'</td><td>kabarè -i<br>cabaret-?.NOM.PL<br>'cabaret'</td><td>impresari-i<br>impresario-?.NOM.PL<br>'impresario'</td><td>krupijè -i<br>croupier-?.NOM.PL<br>'croupier'</td></tr></tbody></table>

\* Nouns of this type with an accented final syllable preserve this syllable as part of the stem in declension.

For speakers who agree them in masculine gender, all these nouns are hence class I nouns with exceptional endings in the nominative singular – conditioned by phonology and for some of them also the shape in the donor language, rather than being members of class II.

The other seemingly exceptional pattern pointed out by the reviewer are class II and IV nouns used for animate individuals, as illustrated in (5). Arguably, however, these nouns do not have animate denotation. They denote abstract notions, likely tokens of properties. Their animate use is either metaphorical, i.e. metonymic, or idiomatic – in both cases irrelevant for the productive properties of the declension classes (Moltmann 2004; Villalba 2009; Arsenijević 2012), and the use for animates, or humans (if at all they ever denote animate individuals, since for instance none of these nouns can be used referentially, e.g. as an answer to the question *Who told you that?* – see Arsenijević et al 2021 for a discussion and experimental support regarding this kind of non-referential nouns in class III).
(5)

a. lik-n-ost-Ø

person-ADJ-N-IV.NOM.SG

‘personality’

b. velik-an-stv-o

great-ADJ-N-II.NOM.SG

‘majesty’

c. čud-ov-išt-e

marvel-ADJ-AUGM.N-II.NOM.SG

‘monster’

Back to the issue of gender agreement, different analyses have been proposed for it – whether specifically for SC, or for other Slavic languages (such as variation in patterns of agreement available regarding the mapping between gender and declension classes is limited, analyses for one Slavic language with declension are quite straightforwardly adapted for another). Corbett (1991), Aronoff (1994), Wechsler and Zlatić (2003) among others postulate two independent features for the two sources of information: each noun is specified for both gender and declension class (where the former may be even further split), and grammatical operations and hierarchies decide about agreement. Others, like Müller (2004), Puškar (2017) or Caha (2021) propose to fully discard the declension classes as syntactic features or diacritics, and derive them from other features. While Müller (2004) does not identify the particular features using formal labels instead (F₁, F₂...), Puškar (2017) indicates them to centrally involve gender, and Caha (2021) explicates a set of four relevant features: class, feminine, individuated, and a fully unmarked case feature. A significant advantage of the latter type of accounts is that they can explain regularities about intra- and interdeclension syncretism.

Alternative approaches, such as Hachem (2015), Fassi Fehri (2018), Arsenijević (2017), argue that declension classes as well as agreement reflect properties of quantity (which include animacy and gender as markers of a high degree of individuation, see e.g. Matasović 2004), rather than gender alone. Particularly relevant for the present paper is Corbett’s (1982) point that grammatical gender can be derived from the declension class.

The central goal of this paper is to develop an explicit reductionist analysis of the relation between gender and properties of quantity on the one hand, and declension classes on the other, where it is the declension class that is represented by a feature, with gender effects deriving from it, rather than the other way around as previously argued. Quantitative as well as theoretical arguments are provided in favour of the proposed view.

The paper is organised as follows. § 2 outlines the main tendencies of the previous accounts for declension classes in SC and other Slavic languages. § 3 discusses the desiderata for an analysis and where previous analyses failed to achieve them. § 4 lays out the quantitative data obtained from an annotated database of the 4,718 most frequent nouns in SC. § 5 presents a novel analysis on which declension class is lexically assigned and occurs in syntax as a feature, and ef-
fects on gender and properties of quantity associated with declen-
sion classes emerge via pragmatic competition. § 6 proposes a novel
morphological analysis of the SC declension class system on which
class I lacks endings all together, and is entirely realised in terms of
syncretism with other classes. The other three classes are ordered
according to the balance between the role played by the theme vow-
el and case endings, and their tendency to be realised overtly.

2 Declension Class in Terms of Realisation

Realisational approaches to morphology, such as Distributed Mor-
phology (Halle, Marantz 1993) and Nanosyntax (Starke 2010), take
syntax to operate on features (and roots) only, and resolves the prob-
lems of morphology in an interaction between syntactic structures,
the lexicon and the phonology, at their interface. Hence, instead of
postulating both gender and declension class as two separate fea-
tures which enter grammatical interactions, these approaches offer
an alternative where declension class is a matter of realisation sensi-
tive to gender. Indeed, Puškar (2017) indicates that declension class is
best modelled in terms of gender-sensitive realisation – unfortunately
without developing a concrete proposal. Privizentseva (2020) offers
a more concrete analysis for Russian – but she simply stipulates an
opaque formal feature which together with the feature of gender de-
termines the realisation of case. The analysis hence merely formalis-
es the view that declension class is a function of gender, but does not
pinpoint the exact additional component that completes the specifica-
tion of this mapping.<fnref n="4" /> The only attempt to provide a transparent (in
the sense that concrete, independently attestable features are used)
and explicit realisational account of declension classes in Slavic lan-
guages is Caha (2021) with a model of Russian declension classes. In
what follows I will give only a brief assessment of his analysis, try-
ing to minimise the unavoidable injustice to the presented work en-
forced by spatial limitations.

Caha outlines the entire path of reasoning from having the rele-
vant functional features realised by roots (or more broadly nominal
stems), via a view where the roots realise a relatively small functionnal
sequence, while the features relevant for declension classes are
realised by the very endings, to a hybrid, where in some case forms
the root realises a long span, while in others it shrinks and the end-

<footnote n="4">⁴ Similar in spirit is Müller’s analysis (2004), where two opaque features are intro-
duced to capture the syncretism between Russian declension classes. However, this
analysis has no ambition to derive declension class from gender via realisation, but rath-
er considers the two features that determine it independently present in the structure.</footnote>
ing realises the relevant projections.

For illustration, the singular case forms of the Russian noun *zavod* 'factory' receive realisations as in (6) (Caha's (101)). In the nominative and the accusative form, the root realises the lexical content, the features REF(ERENCE), CLASS, IND(IVIDUATED), and the formal features combining to determine the particular cases. In the remaining case forms, the root shrinks, and the ending realises the features CLASS, IND, next to the relevant case features.

<table><caption>(6) Re-elaboration of Caha's analysis of *zavod* 'factory'</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>xNP</th><th>REF</th><th>CLASS</th><th>IND</th><th>F1</th><th>F2</th><th>F3</th><th>F4</th><th>F5</th><th>F6</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>NOM</th><td></td><td></td><td colspan="2">zavod</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><th>ACC</th><td></td><td></td><td colspan="2">zavod</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><th>GEN</th><td></td><td></td><td colspan="2">zavod</td><td></td><td></td><td>a</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><th>LOC</th><td></td><td></td><td colspan="2">zavod</td><td></td><td></td><td>e</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><th>DAT</th><td></td><td></td><td colspan="2">zavod</td><td></td><td></td><td>u</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><th>INS</th><td></td><td></td><td colspan="2">zavod</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>om</td><td></td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>

The costs the analysis pays for its great reductionist capacity include treating all the members of one of the two bigger declension classes (the class in -a in the nominative singular) as idioms where the root is contextually specified to only occur in structures which include the feature FEM(ININE). Moreover, all these nouns involve mismatch between the LF and the PF, in the sense that their meaning matches the entire idiom, and their phonological realisation only the structure below FEM. Furthermore, as Caha explicitly admits, the feature FEM in his account has nothing to do with the feminine natural gender of the referent (otherwise it would not only make all the inanimate nouns in the class interpreted as female, but also those with animate male referents such as *d'ad'a* 'uncle' or the name *Ilya*). The natural gender is an independent factor, which is not syntactically represented, and competes for triggering agreement with the syntactic feature FEM. Recall that animate nouns with mismatches between the declension class and gender are the reason for postulating gender in grammar, in addition to declension classes. Once the feature is dissociated from the semantics of gender, the analysis is not transparent any more (i.e. the feature is no different from Privizintseva's 2020 additional opaque feature).

Caha considers different alternative analytic strategies, pointing out various problems that they face, and indicating that a realisational analysis of Russian declension classes superior to the one he proposes is not possible considering the facts. Yet it is questionable whether the sacrifices that his analysis makes are worth the goal which is achieved.
3 Basics for a Better Model of Declension Classes

The desiderata stated in § 1 include reduction and transparency. Reduction is achieved if one of the two phenomena, declension class or gender, is derived from the other. Transparency is achieved if the phenomenon that serves as the basis for the derivation of the other one is independently attested (i.e. in other domains of syntax, or in semantics or phonology). Transparency thus further contributes to reduction.

Gender is independently attestable in semantics, but only for an-
imate nouns. Declension classes are attested in morphology, in the
endings which different nouns take for the same case form (i.e. in the
same syntactic contexts). A logical step for realisational approach-
es is to have the former represented as a syntactic feature (because
it is LF interpretable), and derive the latter from it via some realisa-
tion rules (as realisational approaches generally do with morpholog-
ical realisations).

For transparency, this relation needs to be total and systematic.
There should be a set of features such that each declension class is
characterised by a unique subset of those features. All the members
of a declension class then should share this exact specification – they
should not lack any of the features from the combination, nor bear
any additional ones from the set.

In this paragraph, I consider the likely candidates for semantic dif-
ferences and, based on a corpus investigation, argue that while ten-
dencies are clearly observable, no sufficiently strong contrast can be
identified. This leads to the conclusion that the declension class must
be a syntactic primitive, i.e. in feature-based approaches: a feature or
a combination of formal features whose direct interpretation is the
specification of the set of endings realising case forms of the noun.
To achieve reduction, then, the only option is to derive gender from
declension classes, which is the path I take in § 2.

Another important observation, which previous analyses overlook,
is that what is in the literature referred to as (grammatical) gen-
der (as discussed above regarding Caha’s view) is effectively also a
choice between declension classes. As already outlined in § 1, gram-
matical gender is identified by the agreement patterns the noun trig-
gers. More concretely, it is identified by the set of endings the agree-
ing item takes. There are altogether three such sets of endings, one
that is described as masculine, one as feminine and the third as neu-
ter. But not only, as pointed out in the discussion of Caha, these end-
ings establish a correlation with gender in animate nouns – they al-
so fit the definition of declension classes. The only difference is that
agreeing items are lexical categories that are not restricted to one
declension class – they can combine with all three of them. In oth-
er words, what is referred to as grammatical gender is a declen-
sion class too: masculine is the adjectival declension class I, neuter is class II and feminine class III (this is also reflected in the shared endings between nominal and adjectival declension classes or morphological components thereof). Approaches which derive declension classes from gender thus effectively derive the declension class of the controller from the declension class of the agreeing item. There is something paradoxical about it.

One big problem for predicting the declension class from the gender feature alone is quite obvious: declension classes III and IV are both described as bearing feminine gender (i.e. they trigger exactly the same agreement patterns). Only based on gender, it is hence impossible to predict which noun will realise its case by class III and which by class IV endings.

Obvious candidates for the features that conspire with declension class to determine agreement are those that Caha (2021) employs in his model. Caha's final account however does not make use of all the four features it includes – rather, features CLASS, FEM and IND always remain together, and may for the intents and purposes of his analysis be replaced by only one feature – or it could be only one of them that plays the relevant role.

Feature *REF* is supposed to be common for all nouns, or at least to have the same status in all of them (Baker 2003). Feature *FEM* basically stipulates agreement and effectively splits the set of declension classes in two (the masculine and the neuter declension class on the one hand, and the two feminine declension classes on the other). Features *CLASS* and *IND*, which are closely related to properties of quantity (such as count, mass, atomic), should then be responsible for distinguishing at least between the former and the latter two. As two features have the potential of specifying four different classes (absence of both, only *CLAS*, only *IND*, both *CLASS* and *IND*), the question emerges whether the remaining two features are needed at all.

Works like Hachem 2015, Fahri Fessi 2018 and Arsenijević 2017 follow exactly this path: they argue that the unit of counting (i.e. possibly its absence) and the type and degree of individuation are the properties behind not just declension classes, but actually also what is traditionally seen as gender. In this family of views, it is the finer division along these dimensions that plays a role: rather than reflecting mass vs. count denotations or a mere degree of individuation, the relevant features reflect particular kinds of mass, or different degrees of individuation. This view takes differences between non-atomised masses (*space*, *time*), atomised masses (*sand*, *powder*), collective denotations (*crew*, *clan*), vague count denotations (*ocean*, *field*, *plane*), together with the opposition between abstract and concrete denotations, animate, inanimate and human, or events, properties and individuals, as the base for the emergence of declension classes. Natural gender then presents only a fraction of the set of properties which
conspire to yield the traditional gender agreement and the division of nouns into declension classes cross-linguistically.

Arsenijević (2017) supports this view by data from SC showing that neuter nouns (which all also belong to declension class II) manifest a range of deficiencies regarding individuation. Examples as in (7) manifest that neuter agreement is not available to highly individuated plural uses such as in demonstratives used with pointing, animates generally or conjunction.

(7)

a. Ona *(deca) su neumorna. (pointing at children)
those.NEUT.PL child.NEUT.PL AUX.PL tireless.NEUT.PL
'Those children are tireless' / *'Those are tireless'.

b. dugm-e dugm-eta tel-e *tel-eta
button-NEUT.SG button-NEUT.PL calf-NEUT.SG calf-NEUT.PL
'button' 'buttons' 'calf'

c. Sel-o i polj-e su potopljen-i / *potopljen-a
village-NEUT.SG and field-NEUT.SG are.PL flooded-MASC.PL / flooded-NEUT.PL
'The village and the field are flooded'.

On this basis, Arsenijević argues that neuter corresponds to the absence of the classifier feature, i.e the absence of Landman's (2011) neat generating capacity (see also Arsenijević 2017), which blocks the formation of a proper plural. He claims that the form traditionally analysed as N.PL is rather a collective plural form (a weak division over a messy quantity structure in Landman's sense), unable to express highly individuated plural meanings.

In modelling the relation between gender, properties of quantity and declension classes, a quantitative insight into the structure of the nominal category in the language use is highly informative. Seeing what proportions of the nouns in each class are accounted for by each of the approaches, and how many remain unaccounted for can give us a measure of plausibility of these accounts. This can help us both determine the minimal set of features needed to account for the facts, and the optimal direction of derivation, i.e. whether declension class should be derived from gender and properties of quantity, or it should be lexically specified, and display effects on the interpretations in the domain of gender and properties of quantity.
## 4 Declension Classes, Gender and Properties of Quantity: A Quantitative Corpus-Based Analysis

To empirically test the modelling options in the domain of declension classes, gender and properties of quantity, I performed a corpus-based research. The material was assembled by first excerpting the 5,000 most frequent SC nouns from the srWaC corpus (Ljubešić, Klubička 2016), and removing doubles and non-words, which reduced the material to a database of 4,718 nouns. The nouns were then annotated for the properties in **table 2** (the database is annotated for a significantly larger set of properties, but only the ones relevant for the discussion are given in the table).<fnref n="5" />

<table><caption>**Table 2** Annotated properties of SC nouns in the database</caption><tr><td><strong>Freq</strong></td><td>Frequency (tokens per million words)</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Class</strong></td><td>Declension class (I-IV)</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Gram. gender</strong></td><td>What agreement the noun triggers (MASC, FEM, NEUT, HYB[rid])</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Nat. gender</strong></td><td>Lexical semantic restriction of the sex of the referent (NMASC, NFEM, NNEUT, Ø)</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Anim</strong></td><td>Animate (1, 0)</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Count</strong></td><td>Does the noun inflect for plural (1, 0)</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Mass</strong></td><td>Does the noun combine with mass quantifiers like sve 'all' (1, 0)</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Coll</strong></td><td>Does the Sg noun allow both Sg and Pl agreement (1, 0)</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Group</strong></td><td>Does the noun in the singular denote a group of entities (1, 0)</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Name</strong></td><td>Is it a proper name for any class of individuals (1, 0)</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Suff</strong></td><td>Does the noun have at least one suffix (1, 0)</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Suff1</strong></td><td>What is the first external (linearly last) suffix of the noun if it has any</td></tr></table>

Additionally, the mass nouns in the database have been annotated for the properties in **table 3**.

<table><caption>**Table 3** Additional properties annotated only for mass nouns</caption><tr><td><strong>Abstract</strong></td><td>Is the noun abstract (1, 0)</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Atomised</strong></td><td>Does the denotation of the noun involve a level of minimal units (1, 0)</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Atom-type</strong></td><td>If atomised, what is the type of atoms (concrete, abstract, event, vague)</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Mass-type</strong></td><td>The ontological class (spatial, temporal, structure, domain, dimension, complex, assembly, substance, emotion, condition, capacity, property, event, vague count)</td></tr></table>

<footnote n="5">5 The database was annotated by two annotators, the author and Adisa Nanić, a master student and native speaker of SC. Inter-annotator disagreements were resolved by consulting other native speakers.</footnote>
The database indicates significant differences between the sizes of declension classes. Class I and class III are the largest, with 2,259 and 1,563 member nouns, respectively. Class II is somewhat smaller, with 720 nouns, and class IV is very small with only 178 members. Moreover, it turned out that 71% of class II nouns are derived from the (predominantly deverbal) suffix -VVje (Arsenijević 2010; Simonović, Arsenijević 2014), and 72% of class IV nouns from the deadjectival suffix -ost. There are hence only 51 nouns of class IV which are not derived from the suffix -ost in our sample. The proportion is probably even more drastic in the aggregate lexicon, as the suffix is highly productive, thus implying a large number of hapaxes.

Quantitative analyses have been performed for the relation of declension class with the properties Gender, Anim, Mass, as well as the within-mass properties Abstract, Atomised and Atom-type. The remaining annotated properties either did not show a significant effect, or their effect could be subsumed under that of one or a combination of the discussed properties.

**Grammatical gender** establishes a very tight match with declension classes. Class I systematically agrees with masculine, class II with neuter, class IV with feminine gender. The only locus of incomplete match lies in class III, which has a number of human members showing hybrid gender agreement: masculine in singular and feminine in plural (see (2)). In the sample of 4,718 nouns, with 1,563 class III nouns, 46 such nouns are identified (0.97% of the database and 2.94% of class III nouns). Grammatical gender is hence a very good predictor of declension class, and assuming that each gender value is represented as a different feature (combination), a realisational account based on it covers a very large portion of the data. In order to cover the small subset of class III nouns that trigger hybrid agreement, one first needs to see whether there is a feature that all of them share. Of all the properties annotated in the database, two are shared by all these nouns: they are all animate, and none of them is specified for feminine natural gender (i.e. 14 are male proper names, 8 are nouns denoting male roles such as čika 'uncle' or papa 'pope', and the remaining 24 are gender-general, like sudija 'judge' or arhitekta 'architect'). A realisational account is hence possible where +GMASC (i.e. grammatical masculine gender) triggers class I realisation, except in the context +GMASC +HUM-NFEM +SG (grammatical masculine, human, non-natural-feminine, singular), which triggers class III realisation. Inversely, grammatical gender can be derived from the combination of the declension class and the remaining features above (+HUM-NFEM +SG).

An additional problem for a realisational account of the declension class is that not just a majority of class III forms trigger feminine agreement, but also all the nouns in class IV. Hence, a noun specified for +G_FEM is underspecified between class III and class
IV realisations. Yet, as the discussion of other properties in a quantitative perspective below shows, class III is open for all the values of all the considered properties, which means that there is no property which could be represented as a distinctive feature or a distinctive set of contexts for the two declension classes. Note that, if declension class is specified and gender agreement is realisational, no ambiguity arises as feminine agreement can be specified to be realised in both types of contexts: class IV and class III with the exception of III +HUM-NFEM+SG, where it is the masculine agreement that gets realised. Recalling further that the actual substance of gender agreement is declension class assigned to the agreeing item, it gets even more plausible to consider declension class of the noun as the primitive, rather than gender agreement.

**Natural gender** posed a problem for annotation, in there being different strengths of gender presuppositions. Among those nouns that qualify for it (all the animate nouns), some have a relatively weak presupposition, others moderate and yet others a strong one. Any test that was tried faced this issue, including the one eventually implemented, illustrated in (8).

(8)

a. ženski jaguar b. ženski sudija c. ?ženski papa d. #ženski deda
female jaguar.I female judge.III female pope.III female grandpa.III
'female jaguar' 'female judge' 'female pope' 'female grandpa'

e. ženka-jaguar f. žena-sudija g. ?žena-papa h. #žena-deda
female-jaguar.I woman-judge.III woman-pope.III woman-grandpa.III
'female-jaguar' 'woman-judge' 'woman-pope' 'woman-grandpa'

The problem for annotation actually only reflects the fact that the natural gender of a noun is not a discrete value, as it is strongly influenced by cultural constructs. Whether an animal will be prototypically represented as a male or a female, how immanent a property of a pope it is that it is a male, and how immanent it is for a grandpa – are not questions that render clear-cut categories. Generally, the degradation is stronger for humans than for animals, and for nouns with an established minimal pair in gender than for those without it. It is also typically stronger in singular than in plural. In the annotation, therefore, only human nouns were annotated for natural gender,<fnref n="6" /> and it was specified for any noun that causes degradation

<footnote n="6">6 Very few animal-denoting nouns caused degradation in combination with the adjective muški 'male' (svinja 'pig', krava 'cow', ovca 'sheep', koza 'goat', mačka 'cat'), i.e.</footnote>
when combined with the adjective muški 'male', i.e. in a (semi-)com-
pound with muškarac 'man' (as +NFEM) or ženski 'female', i.e. žena
'woman' (as +NMASC), irrespective of the strength of degradation.

Even though in the annotation the mapping of this property onto
discrete values was forced, looking only at the singular forms, the
insights above suggest that natural gender cannot be a grammatical
feature, as grammatical features are stable discrete formal objects,
rather than continuous scalar ones, which moreover change depend-
ing on other features (number in this case).

There are two more reasons why natural gender is unlikely to be
a feature. One is that it often emerges as a consequence of the exist-
ence of a minimal pair of lexical items specialised for the opposite
genders (see also Merchant 2014; Sudo, Spathas 2019). This indicates
that lexical competition in pragmatics is a possible source of natural
gender, even if the lexical semantics does not necessarily include it
(this is supported by the effect of number, as in plural, gender-gen-
eral interpretation figures more prominently in the pragmatic com-
petition, see also Puškar 2018; Mitić, Arsenijević 2019).

The other reason is the quantity of nouns carrying natural gen-
der. In the entire database, 192 nouns are annotated as restricted
regarding natural gender (139 to male and 53 to female referents).
This makes 4.07% of the database. It is not just unusual, but also un-
economic that a system employs a feature marked for either of its
two values on such a small fragment of the targeted lexical category.
**Animate** nouns are most frequent within class I, with 32.64%. Class
III is second with 10.71% of animates. In classes II and IV, animate
nouns have a marginal presence with 5 (0.69%) and 4 animate mem-
bers (2.25%), respectively. Even among these nine members, one in
class II and two in class IV are collective nouns that are not tradition-
ally considered proper animates. Moreover, as shown in Arsenijević
(2017), even animate diminutives, which would add a couple of dozens
of lower frequency animates to class II if the sample were expanded,
all show a defective behaviour, manifested for example in failing to
inflect for plural. Assuming that the seven exceptions are idiomatical-
ly stored, declension classes can be divided in two carrying or real-
ising a -ANIM feature (class II and IV, assuming the animates are lex-
ically stored as idioms) and two without it (class I and III).

All together there are 542 count animate common nouns and 377
personal names in the database – in sum 919 count animate nouns,
i.e. 19.48% of the sample. Only these nouns are candidates to car-
ry natural gender features, as they can only be interpreted on ani-
mates. In the remaining over 80% of nouns, gender features may only

<footnote>ženski 'female' (konj 'horse', pas 'dog'). All of them have specialised nouns for the gen-
der denoted by the adjective used for testing.</footnote>
occur as purely formal. Nothing predicts their presence or absence, and they basically stipulate the agreement patterns, i.e. the declension classes of the agreeing items.

Finally, there is also a number of animate nouns controlling feminine agreement, which do not trigger female, and even tend to trigger male presuppositions, such as *pijanica* 'drunkard', *budala* 'fool', *spavalica* 'sleeper'. An approach stipulating the feature FEM on these nouns would correctly predict their agreement, but would incorporate a problematic property, namely that an animate noun carrying feature FEM triggers male presuppositions. Even worse, hybrid nouns like *komšija* 'neighbour', *gazda* 'master', *vladika* 'bishop' would need to be specified for not bearing the feature FEM in the singular, but receiving it in the plural, while triggering male presuppositions in both sets of forms.<fnref n="7" />

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a. tešk-a pijanic-a b. naš-Ø komšij-a c. naš-e komšij-e
heavy-FEM drunkard-III our-MASC neighbour-III our-FEM.PL neighbour-III.PL
‘heavy alcoholic’ ‘our neighbour’ ‘our neighbours’

**Mass** nouns in the broad sense determined by our test make up 81,63% of class IV and 72,67% of class II nouns. Among class I and class III nouns, they are represented with only 7,16% and 26,21%, respectively.

In class II, this is mostly due to the productivity of the suffix -VV,je and the abstract mass individual-to-property denominal suffix -stvo (9,32%), as these suffixes derive almost only mass nouns.

Due to the productivity of the suffix -ost, the percentage for class IV is expected to significantly increase when lower frequency nouns are included.

However, the optimism from the sharp contrasts is relativised by the fact that still a quarter of class III and 162 nouns from class I have mass denotations and would need to be idiomatically stored in case mass semantics were used as a feature that takes part in deriving the declension class.

**Collective** nouns, which I take in the narrow SC-specific sense of nouns that denote groups of entities and allow both singular and plural number agreement, are generally rare – no class reaches 1% of collective members. Still, differences indicate a clear split in the

<footnote n="7">7 One may, of course, always introduce an additional gender feature, such that one is responsible for agreement, the other for the interpretation (see e.g. Puškar 2017), but this is a costly methodological choice – especially considering that an additional account is still needed for how these two features determine the realisation of the inflection (i.e. the declension class).</footnote>
tendencies. It seems that class I is closed for collectives: even though it is the largest class, it does not have a single collective member. Class III has 0.19% collective members, class IV 0,56% and class II 0,83%. Part of the reason is that class II and class IV have morphological operations deriving collective nouns (suffix -VV.je with nominal bases and suffix -ad with class II nouns as bases, respectively).

Together, mass and collective nouns indicate 1) that classes II and IV are much more likely to be homogeneous (i.e. cumulative and divisive) in mereological terms (e.g. Krifka 1989), i.e. to have non-atomised and/or messy semantics in terms of Landman (2011), 2) that class I has a strong tendency for quantised, i.e. neat atomised semantics, and 3) that class III is open for all types of meaning. Similar can be concluded from animacy, considering that animacy ranks high on the individuation hierarchy, as opposed to mass and collective meanings. In all these properties, class III ranks in the middle, indicating that it is permissive for all the observed properties.

Let us now skip to the properties annotated for mass nouns only. Note that the test used to identify mass nouns is whether the noun combines with the mass quantifier sav 'all'. This quantifier combines not only with proper mass nouns, but also with all the nouns that have a vague quantity interpretation. The annotation aimed to identify as mass only those nouns that combine with the quantifier in their dominant interpretation, i.e. without accommodating the vagueness. Still, the nouns identified as mass ended up including a number of count vaguely bounded nouns, as illustrated below – where it was hard to put the boundary between dominant and non-dominant interpretations. The annotation of the type of atomisation identifies this subclass, thus splitting the broad class of mass nouns into a big part which is quite reliable, and a smaller one with compromised reliability.

The property **atomised** was annotated with three values: as atomised, when the noun denotes a homogeneous assembly of atomic units (pa-sulj 'beans', pesak 'sand', društvo 'society') or an assembly of units varying in the relevant properties (divljač 'game [wild animals]', smeće 'trash', komšiluk 'neighbourhood'); as count vague, when the noun in the singular denotes a singular entity without internal atomisation, but with vague boundaries (dah 'breath', svemir 'space', oblast 'area'); or as non-atomised, when the noun denotes a proper mass: homogeneous, unbounded, without internal atomisation (tečnost 'liquid', komfor 'comfort', ambicija 'ambition').

Event-denoting nouns presented an additional challenge for annotation, as it is hard to properly map them onto the classification above. The following strategy was opted for nouns denoting states, and pure processes without any specification of a culmination like

<footnote n="8">8 The latter two types were separated in the property type of atom.</footnote>
čekanje 'waiting', egzistencija 'existence', rad 'work' were annotated as narrow (i.e. non-atomised) mass. Those denoting single instances of a rather bounded eventuality like isplata 'payment', podsticaj 'encouragement', bekstvo 'escape', were annotated as vague, as they indeed have plurals and are characterised by vague boundaries like vague count nouns above. Finally, nouns preserving the secondary imperfective semantics and therefore having an iterative interpretation (ispaljivanje 'firing', izvrtanje 'turning inside out') were annotated as atomised - assuming that single iterations of the eventuality constituting potentially unbounded assemblies are equivalent to atoms constituting a homogenous unbounded mass. The aggregate distribution is given in **table 4**.

<table><caption>**Table 4** The distribution of types of atomisation among mass nouns (%)<fnref n="9" /></caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Class I</th><th>Class II</th><th>Class III</th><th>Class IV</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>atomised</td><td>12,55</td><td>38,86</td><td>21,64</td><td>5,91</td></tr><tr><td>vague</td><td>31,39</td><td>13,90</td><td>11,56</td><td>18,34</td></tr><tr><td>mass</td><td>56,05</td><td>47,23</td><td>66,79</td><td>75,73</td></tr></tbody></table>

Relative to other classes, class I has a higher proportion of vague count nouns, nouns that only marginally display mass semantics and essentially are weakly quantised. Regarding the remaining two options, class I has a distribution matching the overall average ratio for these two atomisation values. This additionally supports the treatment of this class as highly individuated. One may wonder why there are non-fully-individuated nouns in this class in the first place – but recall that we are anyway dealing with tendencies, and that the percentage of such nouns in the class was very low. Class II has a significantly higher proportion of atomised mass nouns than other classes, and class IV the opposite: a larger number of non-atomised, i.e. narrow mass nouns. This now provides a contrast, even if only tendential, between class II and IV. While they both have a tendency for mass interpretations, class IV tends to have a proper mass interpretation, and class II rather tends to be atomised. Class III is close to the average overall distribution again, except that it has a somewhat lower participation of vague nouns. This confirms again that this class does not take part in the competition in the domain of properties of quantity.

To make sure that the choices made regarding the annotation of event-denoting nouns did not distort the distribution, I consider also the distribution when event nouns are disregarded, as given in **table 5**.

<footnote n="9">⁹ $Chi^2 = 113,9331, p < 0,00001$.</footnote>
<table><caption>**Table 5** The distribution of types of atomisation among mass nouns without event nouns (%)</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Class I</th><th>Class II</th><th>Class III</th><th>Class IV</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>atomised</td><td>15,90</td><td>22,22</td><td>26,33</td><td>4,87</td></tr><tr><td>vague</td><td>32,38</td><td>35,85</td><td>10,97</td><td>17,68</td></tr><tr><td>mass</td><td>51,70</td><td>41,91</td><td>62,69</td><td>77,43</td></tr></tbody></table>

Only class II shows a notable difference, in particular in the increase in vague count nouns at the expense of the other two types. The percentage of vague count nouns has actually tripled, and makes class II the richest of all classes in this type of nouns. Considering that in class II pretty much all event-denoting members are derived by one suffix, the distribution without it is possibly more telling about the class.<fnref n="10" /> Crucially, however, the change only makes stronger the contrast between class II and class IV regarding narrow mass meanings on the one hand, and the atomised interpretations on the other. Finally, the property **abstract** had the distribution in **table 6**.

<table><caption>**Table 6** The distribution of abstractness among mass nouns (in %)<fnref n="11" /></caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>I</th><th>II</th><th>III</th><th>IV</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>abstract</td><td>64,12556</td><td>85,09213</td><td>76,49254</td><td>89,34911</td></tr><tr><td>concrete</td><td>35,87444</td><td>14,90787</td><td>23,50746</td><td>10,65089</td></tr></tbody></table>

Once again, the grouping is into class II and IV as more abstract, in class I as more concrete and in class III as having average distribution. Considering that abstractness is lower in the individuation hierarchy than concreteness, this too supports the view on which classes II and IV tend towards lower values of individuation, class I towards the higher end, and class III is open for various degrees of individuation. The strong contribution of the suffix -VV.je to class II has a significant influence regarding this property too. As the suffix almost only derives event nouns and events are abstract entities, without these nouns, this class ranks very low in abstractness (but other per-

<footnote n="10">10 Since in derived nouns it is the suffix that determines the declension class, the entire set of nouns derived by one suffix might need to be counted as one member of the declension class (this is even more obvious on certain views of derivational morphology, e.g. Lowenstamm 2014; Simonović 2020 for South Slavic). This principle of quantification makes the system even more sharply divided in two small and two large classes (class IV would have 41 members, class II 102, class I 1,559 and class III 699). Since, however, the same suffix does not necessarily assign the same properties of quantity, I chose counting each noun separately as the general approach, leaving an investigation along the lines above for the future, specifically for topics where issues that more strictly correlate with suffixes will be in focus.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 $\text{Chi}^2 = 56.7812, p < 0.00001$.</footnote>
centages would drop too, because event-denoting nouns are a signif-
icant group in all declension classes).

In summary, grammatical gender has a high capacity in predict-
ing declension class, but due to the same agreement pattern of class-
es III and IV, the capacity is higher when the relation is inverted, i.e.
when declension class predicts gender. Natural gender helps account-
ing for just over 4% of the data.

Properties of quantity have a broader coverage. Class I has a very
strong tendency for individuation: it tends to include animate nouns,
is an unlikely class of mass nouns in the broad sense – and when it in-
cludes them, it goes for the vague count and atomised, as well as for
concrete, rather than non-atomised and abstract nouns. Still, this is
a tendency and not a rule – class I includes 176 mass members, and
94 others that are ambiguous between a strict count and a mass in-
terpretation in the broader sense.<fnref n="12" /> The significance of these quan-
tities is strengthened by the fact that class I is syncretic with class
IV in the most frequent forms (NomSg, AccSg, NomPl) and with class
II in almost all the remaining ones, and that nouns not only switch
between class I and class IV, i.e. class II, but there are some that at
least for some speakers may be declined in two classes (bol ‘pain’,
ološ ‘scam’, polen ‘pollen’, i.e. auto ‘car’, radio ‘radio’, dinamo ‘dyna-
mo’). This latter fact might actually be offering a partial answer too:
class IV is almost closed (see Simonović 2020) and its members are
gradually switching to class I, probably exactly due to a reanalysis
based on the frequent syncretic forms. Class I is possibly taking mass
members due to a gradual disappearing of class IV and the syncre-
tism between them, which drives the reanalysis.

Class I could hence in principle be modelled in terms of feature
specification as +ATOM +NEAT (Landman 2011). For this, its 270 mem-
bers that (also) have mass interpretations need to be treated as id-
ioms, i.e. as class I members stored in the lexicon with a mass or
vague interpretation in spite of the strict count feature specification
that they bear. Already these numbers, received on a sample of 4,718
nouns, present quite a large quantity of nouns to be stored, and the ac-
tual numbers for an average speaker are likely five to ten times higher.

Classes II and IV are inanimate (the 7 overall individuated animate
nouns they include are plausibly stored), with a strong tendency for

<footnote n="12">12 The reason why the regularities are only tendential is that they probably emerge as surface generalisations motivated by heterogeneous factors including language use. Their base is the interaction between the lexicon, grammar and pragmatics in language use, and they are restricted by various properties of the grammar and the lexicon (such as the gradual loss of class IV, the general preference to assign less marked declension classes, phonological properties of the stem favouring one declension class or another, specification of the derivational suffix for derived nouns or the shape of the noun in the donor language for the borrowed ones).</footnote>
mass interpretations in the broad sense. When it comes to proper-
ties of quantity, class IV is tendentially specialised for non-atomised
meanings, especially for property-denoting abstract nouns, and class
II for atomised mass, especially for event-denoting abstract nouns.
Class II could hence be modelled as bearing the -NEAT feature, and
class IV as bearing the -ATOM feature. Again, this requires that prop-
er count nouns in class II and atomised nouns in class IV be repre-
sented as idioms interpreted differently than indicated by their fea-
ture specification. Even though the percentage of these exceptions is
higher, due to the small size of the classes, the absolute numbers are
similar to class I. In the sample of 4,718 nouns, this yields 197 class
II and 50 class IV nouns. Due to a high productivity of the suffixes
-VV.je and -ost, the percentage of exceptions is likely to fall with the
expansion of the sample to a speakers's entire lexicon, and the abso-
lute numbers should not grow as much as in class I, but they are still
several times higher than those attested.

The fatal hit for a realisational approach based on the properties
of quantity comes from class III, which is open for all types of inter-
pretations. If modelled in terms of features, this class can be charac-
terised as lacking any of the relevant features, i.e. as having them all,
and being realised based on the superset, i.e. subset principle. The
problem is that there is no noun for which this class does not com-
pete with at least one other class which is more specific and hence
must win as the realisation of the declension class of the noun. The
only way for this class to ever win is that its feature specification is
irrelevant (hence probably absent), and all its members are stored
as idioms (similar to Caha's 2021 proposal). Effectively, this means
that, by extremely conservative means, at least 40% of the nouns in
the lexicon are effectively assigned a declension class in whatever
storage the framework postulates for idiomatic nouns, and at most
60% receive their declension class via realisation based on their fea-
ture specification. It is hard to argue that a model employing both
realisation and an equivalent of lexical specification is better than
one which entirely relies on the lexical assignment of the declension
class as a feature. In the next paragraph, I propose an alternative
model, in which declension class is a feature assigned in the lexicon,
weakly depending on a range of semantic properties, some of which
are independently represented in terms of other features (such as AT-
OM or NEAT), others being a matter of LF interpretation (such as gen-
der). Tendential regularities discussed in this paragraph then must
represent surface generalisations constituting the operation of de-
clenension class assignment, which has independently been argued to
be sensitive to various often clashing factors (segmental phonology,
prosody, properties of quantity, natural gender, borrowed suffix), see
e.g. Nesset 1994. A tentative analysis would have all these interac-
tions captured simply in terms of markedness: more marked values
of one feature (declension class) tend to match with more or with less marked values of other features.

## 5 The Proposal: Nouns are Specified for Declension Classes, Interpretive Effects Emerge in Pragmatic Competition

I have so far provided 4 major arguments against a realisational treatment of declension classes:

1. gender agreement is effectively the declension class displayed by the agreeing item, and hence the grammatical gender is effectively also a declension class specification on an item which can be specified for any of the three agreeing declension classes available;

2. the mapping from grammatical gender to declension classes is not fully defined, since feminine gender may map onto class III as well as class IV; the mapping from declension classes to gender (i.e. from the declension class on the noun to the declension class on the agreeing item) does not suffer from this problem;

3. grammatical gender needs the information about the natural gender to predict the declension class of hybrid gender agreement nouns, but natural gender is not a likely syntactic feature (it is not discrete, and the corresponding meaning may emerge via pragmatic competition);

4. properties of quantity also have a power to predict a significant portion of declension classes, but also with a non-marital set of exceptions and with a particular problem to capture class III and its diachronic stability.

Instead, I argue, declension classes are better represented as features in the nominal projection forming a markedness hierarchy as follows: IV < I < II < III.<fnref n="13" /> Agreement then unfolds in the following way, which is similar in spirit to the analysis proposed by Kučerova (2018), but with declension classes as the basic feature and with a more conventional rescue strategy (she postulates look-ahead outside of the language faculty, into the conceptual-intentional system). Syntax first determines the syntactic domain for the controller of agreement. Then, it inserts copies of a declension class value from this domain onto the agreeing item (as no copy can be inserted for class IV,

<footnote n="13">13 The formality of representation may be further increased by a Nanosyntax style of representation, where, for instance, class I is represented as just the class feature in the respective projection, class II as the absence of this projection (see Arsenijević 2017), class IV as the class feature and a mass feature adjacent to each other, and class III as two consecutive class projections.</footnote>
this class resorts to class III as the most marked). Ideally, it copies
the features of the projecting noun, but there are alternative options
too which I do not discuss in this paper (but see for instance Willer
Gold et al. 2016 and Arsenijević et al. 2021). The structure is even-
tually spelled out and interpreted at PF and LF. In contexts in which
the declension class is interpretable, it triggers presuppositions at
LF. When these presuppositions clash with stronger presuppositions
that are active in the discourse, the derivation crashes. Upon a crash,
syntax may replace the declension class with the default and spell it
out again. If no clash emerges, the derivation converges. Let me il-
lustrate this on a pair of examples.

In both sentences in (10), the subject is a human-denoting nomi-
nal expression from class III. Therefore, this class is copied onto the
agreeing item, and it is spelled out. Feature **HUMAN** causes the de-
clension class feature to trigger gender presuppositions at **LF**. The
gender presupposition triggered by class III is female. Here, the pre-
supposition is not the content of the declension class, nor a proper-
ty assigned to it – but rather a pragmatic mechanism relying on the
procedure of declension class assignment in the lexicon, which in-
cludes natural gender as a parameter. When a declension class shows
a strong tendency regarding some natural gender, pragmatics takes
the occurrence of this declension class in agreement as a source of
weak presupposition of the respective natural gender (similar holds
for the properties of quantity). In (10a), this presupposition clashes
with the presupposition independently available about the referent
(here, a strong male presupposition is triggered by the fact that the
noun *komšija* stands as the unmarked member in the natural gender
opposition with the feminative *komšinica* ‘female neighbour’; for var-
ious degrees of strength of the gender presuppositions depending on
the source, and for additional, experimental evidence for this view,
see Arsenijević et al. 2021).<fnref n="14" /> The derivation crashes. As an attempt of
repair, syntax now spells the structure out with the default declension
class I on the agreeing item. This declension class triggers a male or
gender-unspecified presupposition and the derivation converges. In
(10b), all is the same until the structure is spelled out with the class
III specified on the agreeing item. Here, however, the noun *sestra* ‘sis-
ter’ triggers a strong female presupposition due to being the marked
member in the natural gender opposition with the noun *brat* ‘broth-
er’. Presupposition triggered by agreement matches the independent-
ly available strong presupposition, and the derivation converges.

<footnote n="14">14 In the perspective of Distributed Morphology (Halle, Marantz 1993), the relevant information is whether there is a lexical realisation available for a more marked counterpart that may saliently realise the female gender. This information does not need access to the vocabulary as it is arguably available in the encyclopedia.</footnote>
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a. Komši-a

je

spava-o-Ø

neighbour-III.NOM.SG

AUX.SG

sleep-PCL-I.SG

'The neighbour was sleeping'.

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /></figure>

b. Sestr-a

je

spava-l-a

sister-III.NOM.SG

AUX.SG

sleep-PCL-III.SG

'The sister was sleeping'.

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /></figure>

Something similar happens when class II nouns are used in contexts
presupposing neat quantity structures, as in conjoined singulars trig-
gering the sum-interpretation illustrated in (11).
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Sel-o i polj-e su potopljen-i / *potopljen-a
village-NEUT.SG and field-NEUT.SG are.PL flooded-MASC.PL / flooded-NEUT.PL
'The village and the field are flooded'.

Here, again, syntax first copies class II onto the participle. This triggers the presupposition of a messy quantity structure, which clashes with the strong presupposition of a neat quantity structure triggered by the conjunction of two count singulars. The derivation crashes, and syntax repairs it by inserting the default class I feature on the agreeing item. The derivation then converges.

The correlations that declension classes display with grammatical gender (i.e. with declension classes on agreeing items), natural gender and properties of quantity are best captured in terms of pragmatic competition between the degrees of markedness of declension classes sensitive to the degrees of markedness of natural gender, i.e. of properties of quantity. There are two different domains in which this competition shows effects. One is the lexical assignment of declension classes to nouns, where the competition contributes to the selection of declension class assigned to the noun. The other is the assignment of declension class to the agreeing items, traditionally referred to as gender agreement, where the competition determines the presuppositions triggered in the domain of gender and/or properties of quantity. Let me briefly assess each of the relevant cases.

When it comes to properties of quantity, I assume the four types of meanings already considered in § 4 to be ordered regarding markedness in the following way: non-atomised mass < atomised mass < vague count < strict count. The extreme values on the scale map onto the first two declension classes: non-atomised mass to class IV, strict count to class I. The remaining two values: atomised mass and vague count, which are also quantitatively more marked (i.e. they form significantly smaller classes in the lexicon, see § 4), target the next declension class in the hierarchy: class II. Hence, class IV tends to take mass non-atomised nouns, class I strict count nouns, and class II tends to take mass atomised and vague count nouns. Class I is more likely to take a vague count or an atomised mass noun than a non-atomised mass noun, and class IV is more likely to take an atomised mass noun or a vague count noun than a strict count noun. For reasons yet to be investigated, class III remains outside this mapping and receives members based on other properties, such as expressiveness, segmental phonology, prosody. Note that it is independently clear that other properties play a role, from the fact that even classes I, II and IV do not fully map to properties of quantity, but rather show a tendency. Two of those additional properties, natural gender and expressiveness, are discussed below.
To illustrate this, consider the nouns in (12). The base *konj* ‘horse’ denotes an animate individual, hence with properties atomised and neat, and sitting relatively high in the individuation hierarchy. This supports the assignment of class I. The base *sen* ‘hay’ denotes an atomised mass, which supports the assignment of class II, and the suffix -ost introduces the nominal category for a base that denotes a property, supporting the assignment of class IV. Finally, it remains unclear on the proposed account why the suffix -b is specified for selecting class III, as both semantically and phonologically (i.e. to secure a vowel after the consonant cluster which it typically forms), it could as well take class II.<fnref n="15" />

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konj
horse.I
'horse'

sen-o
hay-ii
'hay'

mlad-ost
young-N.IV
'youth'

ber-b-a
pick-N-III
'harvest'

In agreement, as stated above, the declension class copied from the controller is the first option, but the default is an available option too. Hence, the competition is more intensive than at declension class assignment, as the choice of the declension class is made anew in every context (a noun is assigned class once and keeps it in all its uses). In salient contexts, the selection of a marked declension class triggers the presupposition of the holding of a marked property along the respective dimension. This is the reason for the agreement quirks of class II nouns reported in Arsenijević (2017), including those reported in (7), repeated as (13). Class II is the most marked class when it comes to properties of quantity – a class latently mapped with vague count and atomised mass nouns. Hence, it triggers the presupposition of the corresponding meaning. The pointing context, animate plurals, as well as conjunction, imply assemblies of highly individuated entities, yielding a clash. The pointing is resolved by using the class I form of the demonstrative (*oni* ‘they.II’) and the agreeing form of the predicate, the plural by using the collective plural form from class IV (*telad* ‘calves.COLL’), and the conjunction again by resorting to class I, this time on the agreeing item only.

<footnote n="15">15 An anonymous reviewer suggests that arbitrary choices and mismatches of the type discussed could be a trace of diachronic processes. If it is correct that declension class assignment proceeds in the interaction of grammar, pragmatics and the lexicon in language use, it is indeed plausible that current assignments are traces of some earlier stages in which they were the optimal choices – under the condition that the later stages of development did not render them (strongly) suboptimal.</footnote>
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a. Ona *(deca) su neumorna. (pointing at children)
those.II.PL child.II.PL AUX.PL tireless.II.PL
'Those children are tireless' / *'Those are tireless'.

b. dugm-e dugm-eta tel-e *tel-eta tel-ad
button-II.SG button-II.PL calf-II.SG calf-II.PL calf-SUFF.IV.SG
'button' 'buttons' 'calf'

c. Sel-o i polj-e su potopljen-i / *potopljen-a
village-II.SG and field-II.SG are.PL flooded-I.PL / flooded-II.PL
'The village and the field are flooded'.

Natural gender is a property of animate nouns. Moreover, it only shows on the strictly count ones among them – as natural gender is a property of an individual, not of a group. Since strictly count animates are very high on the individuation hierarchy, and since, due to the mapping to properties of quantity, classes II and IV do not take nouns so high on this hierarchy, the opposition in natural gender only establishes competition between classes I and III. Regarding markedness, masculine natural gender is unmarked and feminine is marked. The mapping is such that the value of gender characterised by higher markedness maps onto the declension class that is more marked. As a result, all the nouns denoting females are assigned class III, and a majority of nouns denoting males are assigned class I (of the 139 natural masculine gender nouns in the database, 12 belong to class III, together with all the 52 natural feminine nouns). Again, class III turns out to be open for all the values, while class I is exceptionless in not taking one of the values – the feminine natural gender.

To illustrate this, in the respective culture, the prototypical ant is represented as male, and the prototypical bee as female. As the only two classes that can take a (non-diminutive) animate noun are class I and III, class I wins for the *ant* because it is does not clash with the male presupposition and is the default class, and class III for the *bee*, as it does not clash with the female presupposition. The agentive suffix *-ar* derives the human denoting noun *rudar* 'miner' and, as the prototypical human in the culture is conceptualised as a male, the noun receives class I. The phonologically empty suffix *-k* is added to this noun to derive a marked minimal pair. This markedness can be interpreted along several lines: as a diminutive, as the opposite gender, as an expressive variant (a similar observation is made in Caha 2021; see Potts 2007 for a discussion of expressive semantics). In the particular case, the functional load determines the marked gender, i.e. female interpretation as the relevant dimension. Since the corresponding presupposition matches class III, this is the class assigned to the noun.
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<table><tr><td>mrav</td><td>pčel-a</td><td>rud-ar</td><td>rud-ar-k-a</td></tr><tr><td>ant</td><td>bee-iii</td><td>mine-er.i</td><td>mine-er-k-iii</td></tr><tr><td>'ant'</td><td>'bee'</td><td>'miner'</td><td>'she-miner'</td></tr></table>

In agreement too, the competition only emerges with humans and entities higher than that in the hierarchy. Hence, the competition is between classes I and III only. The more marked class, class III, triggers the presupposition of the more marked natural gender value, feminine (since the opposition is binary, class I favours the masculine gender by antipresupposition). When the declension class is copied in agreement, since agreement is reinterpreted for presupposition in each context as discussed above, a clash may emerge, which gets resolved by the spell out of the default declension class.

Caha (2021, 37) generalises affectiveness as a property of male-denoting members of the Russian counterpart of class III. Indeed, expressiveness occurs to be a third dimension of markedness that interacts with declension classes that arguably enters a mapping of the above type. Assuming that nouns with expressive meanings are marked compared to those without them, a mapping can be established where the marked value of expressivity maps higher rather than lower on the declension-class-markedness scale. Unfortunately, the database does not yet have a complete annotation of the nouns for expressivity, but of the 26 hybrid gender class III nouns in the database, 15 have a clear expressive meaning, ranging from the positive (*deda*, *deka* 'grandpa', *čika*, *teča* 'uncle', *beba* 'baby'), via the ambivalent (*vođa* 'leader', *gazda* 'master', *pristalica* 'supporter'), to the negatively biased ones (*ubica* 'murderer', *budala* 'fool', *ustaša* 'member of the Croatian Nazi movement').<fnref n="16" />

Consider the examples in (15). The noun čovek 'man' and the proper name Petar refer to men. Therefore, they are assigned declension class I. However, their hypocoristic forms čova and Pera (a typical nickname for the name used by close persons), which also denote men, are assigned class III because of their expressive component.

(15)

<table><tr><td>čovek</td><td>čov-a</td><td>Petar</td><td>Per-a</td></tr><tr><td>man.i</td><td>man-iii</td><td>Petar.i</td><td>Per-iii</td></tr><tr><td>'man'</td><td>'man (hypocoristic)'</td><td>'Petar'</td><td>'Petar (hypocoristic)'</td></tr></table>

<footnote n="16">16 The noun *ustaša* in fact has also been bearing a positive expressive value for certain speakers, but it has never been neutral.</footnote>
Similarly, as already presented in (3) above, an expressive component may trigger a noun to display mixed class I/II behaviour, as illustrated in **table 7** below (note that in the nominative and accusative of class II, the endings *e* and *o* are in phonologically conditioned alternation), where the expressive hypocoristic noun *smrdljivko* 'stinky-SUFF-II', unlike its neutral counterpart *smrdljiv-ac-Ø* 'stinky-SUFF-I', shares with class II its typical nominative singular ending and the lack of plural forms for animate nouns, while having the accusative ending characteristic for class II and showing class II agreement behaviour.

<table><caption>**Table 7** Expressivity-induced hybrid between classes I and II</caption><thead><tr><th rowspan="2"></th><th colspan="2">Class I (&lt;Ø, a&gt;)</th><th colspan="2">Expressive noun</th><th colspan="2">Class II (&lt;o/e, a&gt;)</th></tr><tr><th>Sg</th><th>Pl</th><th>Sg</th><th>Pl</th><th>Sg</th><th>Pl</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>NOM</td><td>smrdljiv-c-Ø</td><td>smrdljiv-c-i</td><td>smrdljiv-k-o</td><td>/</td><td>pil-e</td><td>/</td></tr><tr><td>GEN</td><td>smrdljiv-c-a</td><td>smrdljiv-c-a</td><td>smrdljiv-k-a</td><td>/</td><td>pil-et-a</td><td>/</td></tr><tr><td>DAT</td><td>smrdljiv-c-u</td><td>smrdljiv-c-ima</td><td>smrdljiv-k-u</td><td>/</td><td>pil-et-u</td><td>/</td></tr><tr><td>ACC</td><td>smrdljiv-c-a</td><td>smrdljiv-c-e</td><td>smrdljiv-k-a</td><td>/</td><td>pil-e</td><td>/</td></tr><tr><td>INST</td><td>smrdljiv-c-em</td><td>smrdljiv-c-ima</td><td>smrdljiv-k-om</td><td>/</td><td>pil-et-om</td><td>/</td></tr><tr><td>LOC</td><td>smrdljiv-c-u</td><td>smrdljiv-c-ima</td><td>smrdljiv-k-u</td><td>/</td><td>pil-et-u</td><td>/</td></tr></tbody></table>

Declension class assignment is sensitive to other factors too, such as phonology (bases with final consonant clusters tend to take declension classes with overt endings in the nominative rather than those with null morphology) or the shape of the noun in the donor language for loan nouns (nouns ending in -a in the donor language take class III declension, considering that there are no obstacles for such assignment, since class III is semantically flexible), but I do not discuss these aspects here beyond observing that an account realising declension class from gender is not likely to capture them in a transparent way.

The presented view is parsimonious compared to the alternatives, as it only specifies nouns for one relevant feature (class) instead of at least two (grammatical and natural gender, let alone the role of atomisation and neat vs. messy structure). It derives grammatical gender, i.e. the declension class on the agreeing item, from that on the controller of agreement rather than the other way around and does not face the problem of ambiguity of feminine agreement between class III and IV realisation. It is compatible with the findings regarding the pragmatic competition between minimal pairs (Merchant 2014; Sudo, Spathas 2019). Finally, it does not have to store a significant amount of lexical material or forms as idioms interpreted contrary to their feature specification or otherwise face a large number of exceptions. The approach is similar in spirit to Kučerova's (2018), in invoking a semantic evaluation of agreement, but differs both in the scope and in the technical implementation.
# 6 The Morphology of Declension Classes

In this paragraph, I propose a novel morphological analysis of declension classes in SC, which supports the markedness ordering assumed in the discussion and models provided in the preceding paragraphs: IV < I < II < III. The analysis capitalises on the fact that class I has not a single ending that is not syncretic with at least one other class, counting only same case and number counterparts, as obvious from table 1, repeated as **table 8**. In the singular, class I nominative and accusative are syncretic with class IV, class I genitive, dative/locative and instrumental with class II. In the plural, nominative is syncretic with class IV, accusative with class III, genitive with both classes II and III, and dative/locative and instrumental with classes II and IV. I take this as an indication that class I has no endings of its own: it is always realised by the endings from other declension classes.

<table><caption>**Table 8** Declension classes in Serbo-Croatian</caption><thead><tr><th rowspan="2"></th><th colspan="2">Class I (&lt;Ø, a&gt;)</th><th colspan="2">Class II (&lt;o/e, a&gt;)</th><th colspan="2">Class III (&lt;a, e&gt;)</th><th colspan="2">Class IV (&lt;Ø, i&gt;)</th></tr><tr><th>Sg</th><th>Pl</th><th>Sg</th><th>Pl</th><th>Sg</th><th>Pl</th><th>Sg</th><th>Pl</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>NOM</td><td>mrav-Ø</td><td>mrav-i</td><td>mor-e sel-o</td><td>mor-a</td><td>rib-a</td><td>rib-e</td><td>noć-Ø</td><td>noć-i</td></tr><tr><td>GEN</td><td>mrav-a</td><td>mrav-a</td><td>mor-a</td><td>mor-a</td><td>rib-e</td><td>rib-a</td><td>noć-i</td><td>noć-i</td></tr><tr><td>DAT</td><td>mrav-u</td><td>mrav-ima</td><td>mor-u</td><td>mor-ima</td><td>rib-i</td><td>rib-ama</td><td>noć-i</td><td>noć-ima</td></tr><tr><td>ACC</td><td>mrav-(a)<br>(žig-Ø)</td><td>mrav-e</td><td>mor-e sel-o</td><td>mor-a</td><td>rib-u</td><td>rib-e</td><td>noć-Ø</td><td>noć-i</td></tr><tr><td>INST</td><td>mrav-em</td><td>mrav-ima</td><td>mor-em sel-om</td><td>mor-ima</td><td>rib-om</td><td>rib-ama</td><td>noć-ju</td><td>noć-ima</td></tr><tr><td>LOC</td><td>mrav-u</td><td>mrav-ima</td><td>mor-u</td><td>mor-ima</td><td>rib-i</td><td>rib-ama</td><td>noć-i</td><td>noć-ima</td></tr></tbody></table>

Moreover, I use the same feature, DIV, to represent both the genitive case and the plural (see Arsenijević 2005 for an elaboration). Genitive plural has the feature twice, once in the head realising grammatical number and once in the head realising the case.

(16) GEN SG: [K<sub>P</sub> DIV [N<sub>umP</sub> Ø]] NOM PL: [K<sub>P</sub> Ø [N<sub>umP</sub> DIV]] GEN PL: [K<sub>P</sub> DIV [N<sub>umP</sub> DIV]]

This accounts for the fact that the genitive singular forms of classes II, III and IV are identical to their nominative plural forms. Class I takes the plural form of class II for reasons to be briefly assessed. It also explains why genitive plural forms have the form of the nominative plural with a doubled ending (class I and III take the form from class II), again for reasons to be briefly discussed.

Finally, accusative is syncretic with the nominative, except in class III singular, where it has its own ending. I leave aside the differen-
tial object marking in class I, where animates have an accusative ending that is not copied from the nominative cell, but rather from the more marked genitive. Similarly, in plural, class I takes an accusative plural that is not identical to the nominative plural that it takes from class IV, plausibly due to a tendency to pick a more distinctive marking.

Assume further that class II has a mid vowel ($V_{mid}$) as its theme vowel, class III simply a vowel (V), and class IV i. By default, $V_{mid}$ is realised as o (as confirmed by its realisation after a vowel),<fnref n="17" /> but after palatal consonants it gets realised as e. By default, V is realised as a. When the case ending starts with a vowel, in those forms that attach with a theme vowel, the theme vowel remains in the form of a zero vowel, and blocks the phonological interaction of the stem with the suffix. In some forms this is subject to variation, as illustrated in (17), where speakers of one grammar do and speakers of the other do not (drop the zero theme vowel and) palatalize final velars in class II in front of endings with an initial front vowel.<fnref n="18" />

(17) pazuh-ima → %pazusima / %pazuhima (i.e. pazusima / pazuhVima)
klupk-ima → %klupcima / %klupkima (i.e. klupcima / klupkVima)

If all observable instances of syncretism are coded, we arrive at **table 9**, where all instances of syncretism between declension classes are marked by reference to the declension class and by the background colour in the respective cell, and endings are otherwise labelled according to their primary feature content (theme vowels are indexed for the class). The table is purely descriptive, for the purpose of establishing the amount of intra- and interclass syncretism in each class. No theoretical significance is intended (e.g. how the instances of syncretism emerge is not implied), assuming without further evidence that all various approaches to morphology available can derive it one way or another.

za-jah-a-ti
hind-ride-TH-INF
'to mount.PRF'

→ za-jah-V-iv-a-ti
hind-ride-TH-IPF-TH-INF

→ zajahivati / *zajašivati*

<footnote n="17">17 I am grateful to Marko Simonović (personal communication) for this piece of evidence, as well as that in (17).</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 See Arsenijević et al. (2021) for the same effect of a theme vowel without a full vocalic realisation preventing the preceding consonant from undergoing palatalization in the verbal domain, as illustrated in (i).

(i)</footnote>
<table><caption>**Table 9** Sebo-Croatian declension class system re-analysed</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>CI3Sg</th><th>CI2Sg</th><th>CI1Sg</th><th>CI4Sg</th><th>CI3Pl</th><th>CI2Pl</th><th>CI1Pl</th><th>CI4Pl</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>NOM</th><td>Th<sub>3</sub></td><td>Th<sub>2</sub></td><td>Class4</td><td>Ø</td><td>Pl</td><td>Pl</td><td>Class4</td><td>Th<sub>4</sub></td></tr><tr><th>GEN</th><td>Th<sub>3</sub>-Acc</td><td>Nom</td><td>Class4</td><td>Nom</td><td>Nom</td><td>Nom</td><td>Class3</td><td>Nom</td></tr><tr><th>DAT</th><td>Th<sub>3</sub>-Pl</td><td>Th<sub>2</sub>-Pl</td><td>Class2</td><td>Th<sub>4</sub></td><td>Class2/4</td><td>Plx2</td><td>Class2</td><td>Plx2</td></tr><tr><th>ACC</th><td>Dat</td><td>Th<sub>2</sub>-Dat</td><td>Class2</td><td>Th<sub>4</sub></td><td>Th<sub>3</sub>-Inst</td><td>Th<sub>2</sub>-Class4</td><td>Class4</td><td>Th<sub>4</sub>-Inst</td></tr><tr><th>INST</th><td>Th<sub>3</sub>-Inst</td><td>Th<sub>2</sub>-Inst</td><td>Class2</td><td>Th<sub>4</sub>-Inst</td><td>Th<sub>3</sub>-Inst</td><td>Th<sub>2</sub>-Class4</td><td>Class4</td><td>Th<sub>4</sub>-Inst</td></tr></tbody></table>

As the table shows, class III only has one syncretic slot, genitive plural, where it takes a class II or class IV ending.<fnref n="19" /> Class II ending is the default, and class IV ending is conditioned on particular phonological environments (see e.g. Simonović, Baroni 2014). The selection of the class IV ending does not violate the hierarchy. The default ending is taken from the closest declension class. When a phonological context requires a different ending, the alternative is taken from the next closest class with a different ending. As class I is syncretic with class II in this form, the only remaining choice, i.e. the closest declension class with a different ending for genitive plural, is class IV. Class III has the lowest amount of syncretism within itself and with other classes, and the highest number of different own endings. Class IV only participates in syncretism relations as a donor.

Other interesting generalisations include that nominative has no ending in any singular form, but while in classes II and III it involves the theme vowel of the class in a strong realisation (i.e. as a full vowel), in class IV it even lacks this component. The instrumental case universally has the ending -m in the singular and -ma in the plural, except for the singular form of class IV, where it reduces to -u.<fnref n="20" /> Otherwise, class IV has very few endings generally, but also never (obserably) reduces the theme vowel, i.e. it generally relies more on the theme vowel than on endings to realise case forms.

There is only one instance of syncretism under this analysis which skips one declension class in the hierarchy: the genitive plural form in class I which is taken from class III. However, since the accusative on the proposed analysis tends to be a function of the nominative rath-

<footnote n="19">19 I thank an anonymous reviewer for reminding me of the fact that a number of nouns of this class with stem-final consonant clusters take the ending of class IV.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 This alternation is also observed in 1st person singular of the present tense where the ending is -m, but several verbs realise the ending as -u, as well as between the adjectival and the nominal declension where in classes I and II the former takes -m and the latter -u in the dative/locative singular (bel-o-m zid-u 'white-TH-DAT wall-DAT'). It is obviously far-fetched to make any claims, but it is thinkable that in certain contexts -m occurs as the default when -u realises the marked alternation.</footnote>
er than an independent ending, this instance of syncretism is plausi-
bly a property of the function rather than a syncretic ending skipping
the hierarchy. For instance, it could be that the accusative poses a
requirement for the plural number feature to be visible, which is not
satisfied by the two neighbouring candidates, as class IV only has a
theme vowel in this slot, which also occurs in the singular, and class
II has a deficient plural (see Arsenijević 2017), but is satisfied by class
III. The analysis therefore may well feed models with further decom-
position and reduction, such as for instance Caha’s (2009).

The reason why class I avoid class II nominative in the plural is
probably also the reason why both class I and class III take the geni-
tive plural ending from class II. Genitive plural involves a double divi-
sion, once in the number projection and one more time by the genitive
case, as in (16) above. Classes I and III include highly individuated
members (e.g. animate and human nouns), and their plural is hence
interpreted as a neat division over the restriction. For different pos-
sible reasons which may involve avoidance of effective higher order
divisions or the fact that classes I and III also have members with
messy semantics, a weaker plural is preferred in the context of its
double implementation. This is exactly what class II plural does, as
it is accommodated to the messy semantics of this class (recall that
a majority of its members have messy semantics, in particular as at-
omised masses or as vague count denotations). I leave a deeper elab-
oration of this question for future research.

The analysis in table 7 confirms the hierarchical ordering of de-
clension classes as introduced in § 5: IV < I < II < III. Not only is
this supported by the patterns of syncretism, where the given or-
der involves no skipping (under a derivational realisation of the ac-
cusative), but also the numbers of different endings monotonically
decrease, and the occurrences of the theme vowel monotonically in-
crease from left to right.

7 Conclusion

I argued, based on the data from SC, against both views that indepen-
dently represent both declension classes and grammatical gender as
features of the noun, and those that try to derive the declension class
from the combination of grammatical gender and other features. The
arguments that I put forth include the fact that gender is predicta-
ble from the declension class of the noun in almost 96% of the nouns
(on a sample of the 4,718 most frequent nouns) while gender needs
additional information to distinguish between the classes III and IV;
that gender boils down to the declension class of the agreeing item
and hence cannot be a more basic property of a noun than its own
declension class; and that at least four families of properties corre-
late with declension classes (agreement, natural gender, properties of quantity, expressivity) but none correlates absolutely. This last argument is supported by a detailed quantitative study of the relevant properties on a database of annotated SC nouns.

An alternative model is proposed, where the declension class is assigned to nouns in the lexicon and get copied in agreement from the noun onto the agreeing item. Exceptions emerge when the copied value triggers false presuppositions regarding the natural gender, properties of quantity or expressive content, in which case the default declension class I is inserted instead.

Finally, I offered a novel analysis of the SC declension classes, in which the optimal arrangement to capture the patterns of synchronism and the roles of the theme vowels and case endings yields exactly the hierarchy of markedness postulated in the analysis of the mapping of declension classes to natural gender and properties of quantity: IV < I < II < III.

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# It's All Under Control!
## On Perfective Present Forms in BCS Main Clauses

Marco Biasio

Università degli Studi di Padova, Italia

**Abstract** This study aims to provide a unified analysis of the syntax-pragmatics interface of the (allegedly) anomalous licensing of the perfective present (Pres<sup>PF</sup>) in BCS present-tensed main clauses. Although Pres<sup>PF</sup> forms cannot usually refer to eventualities that are anchored to the utterance time (UT), there seem to be three apparent exceptions to this structural constraint. They are as follows: 1) abusive metonymic performatives; 2) live demonstrations; and 3) nonveridical contexts introduced by the epistemic operator možda 'maybe'. It is claimed that for Pres<sup>PF</sup> forms to be licensed in BCS main clauses, control needs to be specified as a variable at the level of the so-called 'Seat of Knowledge' in the SpeechActP layer.

**Keywords** Verbal aspect. Perfective present. Control. Štokavian. Speech act phrase. Syntax-pragmatics interface.

**Summary** 1 Introduction. – 2 Breaking the Law? Anomalous Pres<sup>PF</sup> Forms in Main Clauses. – 2.1 Abusive Metonymic Performatives. – 2.2 Live Demonstrations. – 3 Control as a Variable in SpeechActP. – 4 Conclusions.

<figure><img src="image_13.png" /></figure>

Edizioni
Ca' Foscari

**Peer review**

Submitted
Accepted
Published

2021-07-20
2021-10-15
2020-12-20

**Open access**

© 2021 | © Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License

<figure><img src="image_14.png" /></figure>

**Citation** Biasio, M. (2021). "It's All Under Control! On Perfective Present Forms in BCS Main Clauses". *Balcania et Slavia*, 1(1), 47-66.
# 1 Introduction

It is widely known that both in the Old- and the Neo-Štokavian dialectal groups of the BCS¹ continuum, there is a pervasive grammatical constraint on the licensing of independent perfective present forms (henceforth Pres<sup>FF</sup>) that refer to different kinds of eventualities in certain syntactic environments, such as present-tensed main clauses.² The unavailability of Pres<sup>FF</sup> forms in BCS main clauses is exemplified in (1) below, where the replacement of the inflected Pres<sup>IPP</sup> form of the ambitransitive predicate pisati 'to write' with the corresponding Pres<sup>FF</sup> form of napisati yields absolute ungrammaticality:³

(1) *Pišem*<sub>WRITE 1.sg.PRESIMP</sub> (*Napišem*<sub>WRITE 1.sg.PRESIMP</sub>) sve ovo kao upozorenje novopostavljen-im direktorima na moguća neprijatna iznenadenja. [SrpKor, viva0104_n.txt, Vi-va (April 2001)]

'I'm writing all this to warn all the newly appointed directors of possible un-pleasant surprises'.

The Author wishes to express his gratitude to the editors of *Balcania et Slavia*, three anonymous reviewers of FASL 30 for their thought-provoking remarks which helped me greatly in reworking and fine-tuning the core of the original proposal, two anonymous reviewers for their meticulous comments on an earlier draft of the paper, and all the Štokavian native speakers, members of the Facebook groups South Slavic Linguistics (https://www.facebook.com/groups/697148470712789) and Kako biste VI rekli? (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1649886005251662), who kindly agreed to fill out an online questionnaire. Special thanks go to James Hartstein for checking the correctness and the internal consistency of the text. The usual disclaimer applies.

1. Throughout this article I will adopt the umbrella label BCS (shortly for Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian) in order to refer collectively to the different varieties of the South Slavic dialectal continuum which are nowadays spoken in most of the national republics that emerged after the collapse of Jugoslavia. BCS is to be taken here as a synonym of 'Serbo-Croatian', which was the standard working term in linguistics at least up to the first major outbreak of Jugoslav Wars in 1991. The term however has been sidelined in this paper to prevent the emergence of unwarranted political associations. The Author of the present study acknowledges the scientific validity of the views stated in the Declaration on the Common Language (*Deklaracija o zajedničkom jeziku*) and supports the general claim that Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin should be viewed as national variants (each with equal rights) of the same standard South Slavic polycentric language (for more technical evidence in support of this claim see also Bailyn 2010). The text of the Declaration is available at the following link: https://jezicinacionalizmi.com/deklaracija. Where not specified otherwise, all translations are by the Author.

2. *Eventuality* is here used (in the original spirit of Bach 1986) as a cover term for both states and non-states (processes, events), while the definition of a *main clause* (i.e. a clause which can stand on its own, in opposition both to matrix and subordinate clauses) is given after Haspelmath (2020, 603).

3. In linguistic theory the concept of *grammaticality* has proved to be notoriously hard to disentangle from the (apparently overlapping) notion of *acceptability*. For the sake of clarity we stick to the results of the discussion recently elaborated in Leivada, Westergaard 2020 and Leivada, Murphy 2021, 4-5, where it is claimed that (un)grammaticality, unlike (un)acceptability, is more of a twofold concept (on the axis 'absolute'- 'relative') than a scalar notion.
This constraint has drawn considerable attention over recent decades. In the cognitive literature the functional markedness of grammatical forms with present time reference – resulting from the combination of the aspectual category ‘perfective’ and the temporal category ‘present’ – has been labelled as the *present perfective paradox* (cf. among others De Wit 2017). It has been proposed that such markedness holds cross-linguistically, and is mainly triggered by the cognitive difficulty of processing and representing as a single whole an eventuality token still unfolding at the UT.<fnref n="4" /> In other words, either the eventuality is predominantly represented as holding at the UT (thus focusing on its outer temporal anchoring), or is seen as a single whole (thus zooming in on its inner temporal properties). In more formal terms, adopting a Kratzerian definition of PF according to which the event time interval needs to be included within the reference time interval (i.e. for present-tensed eventualities, the near-instantaneous UT), Todorović (2015, 87-8) argues that the impossibility of satisfying the inclusion requirement of PF within the time interval selected by the UT in SpecT leads to the impossibility for the event to be temporally located, and consequently triggers the absolute ungrammaticality of main clause *Pres*<sup>PF</sup> forms.<fnref n="5" />

De Wit (2017, 38) claims that languages can solve the present perfective paradox resorting to three main repair strategies, i.e. assigning a futural (the *pro prospective strategy*), past (the *retrospective strategy*), or non-actual reading (the *structural strategy*) to eventualities realised with *Pres*<sup>PF</sup> forms. Unlike East Slavic languages, where main clause *Pres*<sup>PF</sup> forms have been prototypically reanalysed as aspectual futures (e.g. Russian *pročitaju*<sub>READ.1.sg.PresPF</sub> ‘I will read’), or even West Slavic languages, where main clause *Pres*<sup>PF</sup> forms can be alternatively used either as aspectual futures or modally nuanced non-actual presents (e.g. Czech *koupím*<sub>BUY.1.sg.PresPF</sub> ‘I will buy’, ‘I buy’), in almost all the South Slavic languages spoken in the Balkans<sup>6</sup> *Pres*<sup>PF</sup> forms have retained only their non-actual function, and thus are unable to refer to eventuality tokens which are anchored to the UT.

Old- and Neo-Štokavian dialects of BCS seemingly adopt a reinforced structural strategy<sup>7</sup> as the licensing of non-actual *Pres*<sup>PF</sup> forms

<footnote n="4">4 The Utterance Time (UT) is here identified with the so-called reference time interval which, according to the proposal of Demirdache and Uribe-Extebarria (2004), occupies a structural position in SpecT.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Note that this formalisation, despite managing to nicely capture the BCS pattern, is not unproblematic *per se*, for it requires several successive adjustments in order to hold true from a cross-linguistic perspective.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Exceptions are made for some Kajkavian and Čakavian dialects of the Croatian variety of BCS, which will not be taken into account in this survey.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 In this respect BCS imposes even more restrictions on the licensing of *Pres*<sup>PF</sup> forms than other South Slavic languages (e.g. Bulgarian) and behaves more similarly to oth-</footnote>
is restricted to embedded clauses (cf. (2), whereby *pročitam*<sub>READ.1.sg.</sub><sub>PRESFF</sub> 'I read' is licensed inside a clause of purpose introduced by the complementizer *da*<sup>8</sup>, interrogative-negative contexts<sup>9</sup> (cf. *ne dodete*<sub>COME.2.pl.PRESFF</sub> 'you don't come' and *ne probate*<sub>TRY.2.pl.PRESFF</sub> 'you don't try' featured in the whimperative structure in (3)) or even chains of

er languages of the *Balkansprachbund*. In Modern Greek, for instance, present tense forms built from the aoristic stem (*synoptikoi* 'momentaneous') cannot occur in main clause contexts and can be licensed either in embedded environments introduced by the subjunctive marker *na* (e.g. *Mporō na alláxō*<sub>CHANGE.1.sg.PRESFF</sub> *tis glōsses óses forés thêlō* 'I can change languages as many times as I want') or, as emphasised by an anonymous reviewer, as complements of the future marker *tha* (e.g. *Tha to peis*<sub>SAT.2.sg.PRESFF</sub> 'You will say it'; cf. Giannakidou 2009). This last use bears some resemblance to the distribution of *Pres*<sup>PF</sup> forms in the Serbian variety of BCS, which can replace the bare infinitive and be licensed by the complementizer *da* after an inflected proclitic form of the (volesitional) future marker (e.g. *On će [da dode]*<sub>COME.3.sg.PRESFF</sub> 'He will come' instead of *On će doći*<sub>COME.InfrFF</sub>). The possible reasons for the difference between BCS and Modern Greek on one hand, the other South Slavic languages on the other are left for future research.

8 It must be added, however, that the licensing of *Pres*<sup>PF</sup> forms in BCS subordinate clauses is subject to further restrictions. Todorović (2017, 88-90) points out that, on the one hand, *Pres*<sup>PF</sup> forms cannot occur in propositional complements of intensional verbs such as *v(j)erovati* 'to believe', at least when their temporal argument is not ordered according to a relation of anteriority (<) or posteriority (>) with respect to the UT, hence the ungrammaticality of sentences such as *\*V(j)eruje da Jovan prevede*<sub>TRANSLATE.3.sg.PRESFF</sub> *p(j)esmu* (intended: '(S)He believes that Jovan has translated a poem (just now)'. In addition, as a result of a more general constraint on the distribution of PF (which possibly holds cross-linguistically), in the Serbian variety of BCS *Pres*<sup>PF</sup> forms cannot be licensed as complements of phasal verbs such as *počinjati* 'to begin' (*\*Počinjem da prevedem*<sub>TRANSLATE.1.sg.PRESFF</sub> *pesmu*, intended: 'I'm beginning to translate the entire poem (just now)'. Generally speaking, as pointed out by an anonymous reviewer, predicates that select either subjunctive or infinitive forms in Romance languages can license *Pres*<sup>PF</sup> forms in BCS. This is, for instance, the case of verbs such as *pokušavati* 'to try', whose tenseless complements do not yield a future interpretation whatsoever (*\*Pokušava da sutra prevede*<sub>TRANSLATE.3.sg.PRESFF</sub> *pesmu*, intended: '(S)He is trying to translate the entire poem tomorrow') and can always enter an aspectual opposition with the corresponding *Pres*<sup>PF</sup> forms. On the other hand, predicates selecting indicative forms in Romance languages block the licensing of *Pres*<sup>PF</sup> forms in BCS. Among them are assertive predicates such as *tvrđiti* 'claim', e.g. *\*Tvrdim da Ivan dode*<sub>COME.1.sg.PRESFF</sub> (intended: 'I claim/am claiming that Ivan is coming').

9 *Pres*<sup>PF</sup> forms can appear in other nonveridical or anti-veridical contexts as well. With a small group of telic eventualities (e.g. *dati* 'to give', *pustiti* 'to let', *dozvoliti* 'to allow', *doći* 'to come'), negative *Pres*<sup>PF</sup> forms are regularly licensed. These forms, which fall outside the scope of this paper, seemingly behave like light verbs and are prototypically marked with 1st (singular and plural) or 2nd (singular and plural) bound person-number indexes, as in (i):

(i) E, vidite, ja *ne dam*<sub>GIVE.1.sg.PRESFF</sub> taj trenutak, tu epohu, tu kristalnu kocku vedrine, “svečanost tragične vedrine”, *ne dam*<sub>GIVE.1.sg.PRESFF</sub> *da* to nestane. [HNK, vj20021110ku03] “So, you see, I won’t give away that moment, that age, that “crystal cube of serenity” [Kristalna kocka vedrine – a house of culture in Sisak], the “celebration of a tragic serenity” [a theatre play by Tomislav Durbešić], I won’t let it disappear”.

Vojvodić's (2015, 55-6) hypothesis that BCS elliptical constructions such as *ne dam* are derived via transformation of future-oriented negative volitional sentences of the type *Neću [da dam]* (lit. 'I won't give (it)') requires a more thorough examination.
habitual eventualities which however need to be explicitly marked as such¹⁰ (in (4) the non-actuality of the eventualities realised with the Pres<sup>FF</sup> forms *popijem*<sub>DRINK.1.sg.PresFF</sub> ‘I drink’ and *iscijedim*<sub>SQUEEZE.1.sg.PresFF</sub> ‘I squeeze’ is signalled by the complex temporal adjunct *svaki dan <nakon jela>* ‘every day <after meals>’ and by the conjoined adjunct *ujutro i navečer* ‘in the morning and in the evening’):¹¹

10 Main clause (Štokavian) Pres<sup>FF</sup> forms can also be licensed in isolation, as long as the temporal anchoring of the clause remains unordered with reference to the UT. Unlike West and East Slavic languages, however, in contemporary BCS modal (dynamic) readings of Pres<sup>FF</sup> have been – to the best of my knowledge – replaced entirely either by overt modal constructions governed by *moći* ‘can’ or by (stylistically unmarked) Pres<sup>FF</sup> forms, cf. (ii):

(ii) On u jednoj ruci *digne*<sub>LIFT.3.sg.PresFF</sub> (*može* [*da digne*]<sub>LIFT.3.sg.PresFF</sub> / *može dići*<sub>LIFT.InfFF</sub> / *diže*<sub>LIFT.3.sg.PresFF</sub>) 25 kg. (Galton 1976, 92)
‘He can lift 25 kg with one arm’.

Other similar contexts include popular sayings (cf. (iii)) and semi-lexicalised expressions (cf. (iv)). Interestingly, in both cases 3rd p. sg. Pres<sup>FF</sup> forms can freely alternate with Aor<sup>FF</sup> forms, which in some cases are homographs and can thus be distinguished only prosodically (cf. *dòde*<sub>COME.3.sg.PresFF</sub> ‘he/she comes’ vs. *dòde*<sub>COME.3.sg.AorFF</sub> ‘he/she came’). Note also that Aor<sup>FF</sup> forms in the given contexts do not trigger any anterior reading whatsoever:

(iii) Ko se dima ne *nadimi*<sub>SMOKE UP.3.5.sg.PresFF/3.5.AorFF</sub> taj se vatre ne *nagrije*<sub>HEAT UP.3.5.sg.PresFF</sub> / nagreja<sub>3.5.sg.AorFF</sub>

‘Results demand sacrifice (lit. “He who does not catch the smoke catches no heat from the fire”)’.

(iv) On mi *dòde*<sub>COME.3.sg.PresFF</sub> brat. (Dickey 2000, 199)

‘He is my brother (lit. “He comes to me as a brother”)’.

Additionally, in several Kajkavian and Čakavian dialects Pres<sup>FF</sup> forms can also be reinterpreted as aspectual futures, most frequently alongside a temporal operator such as *sutra* ‘tomorrow’: compare *sutra dođem*<sub>COME.1.sg.PresFF</sub> ‘Tomorrow I’ll come’, *sutra ti javim-LET KNOW.1.sg.PresFF* ‘I’ll let you know tomorrow’, *sutra naprintam*<sub>PRINT.1.sg.PresFF</sub> ‘I’ll print tomorrow’ and the like (I am thankful to Mladen Uhlik and an anonymous reviewer for providing me with these as well as similar other examples). As for Štokavian areal variation, Polovina (1985, 98-9) illustrates an interesting spoken exchange between two Belgrade-based youngsters around mid-eighties where an apparently independent Pres<sup>FF</sup> form seems to be freely licensed in a future-oriented context (*Dobro, Izađeš*<sub>COME OUT.2.sg.PresFF</sub> u 7, *kažeš imam autobus u* 7.30... ‘Fine, you come out at 7 o’clock, you say I’ve got my bus at 7.30…’). However, a closer look at the communicative situation reveals that the speaker is revisiting a potential future schedule for their interlocutor, in a way similar to the so-called narrative future (Dickey 2000, 149-54), which in turn is usually considered a peculiar instantiation of the historical present template. Since perfective aspectual futures are virtually ungrammatical in Štokavian dialects, then, a comprehensive analysis of these contexts falls outside the scope of the present paper.

11 It should be kept in mind that in both interrogative-negative and explicitly habitual contexts, Pres<sup>FF</sup> forms (*dolaziš, pijem, cijedim*) can always occur. Unlike Pres<sup>FF</sup> forms however, the use of Pres<sup>FF</sup> forms in examples like (3) is linked to the emergence of particular pragmatic inferences which have to do with the contextual actualisation either of circumstantial or dynamic modal meanings (among others Tanasić 1996, 169-70), while in examples like (4) the use of Pres<sup>FF</sup> forms is generally preferred with telic eventualities which are measured out by their (referential) internal argument (among others Dickey 2000, 68-71; Vojvodić 2019, 17).
(2) Kada sam stigao kući, seo sam da *pročitam* READ.1.sg.PresPF nekoliko radova koje su naši mali domaćini napisali na času veronauke povodom Vaskrsa. [SrpKor, poli100402.txt, Politika (02.04.2010.)]

'Once I came back home, I sat and read some works which were written by our little hosts during their religion hour for Easter'.

(3) Mnogo prirodnih ledenih zidova svih stepena težine Vas očekuje u i oko Livinja.

Zašto ne *dodete* COME2.pl.PresPF i *probate* TRY.2.pl.PresPF? [srWaC.4276.7, #4275]

'Lots of ice walls with all degrees of difficulty await you in and around Livigno. Why don't you come and try yourself?' (⇒ 'Come and try! You are invited!').

(4) "Svaki dan nakon jela popijem DRINK.1.sg.PresPF jedno Tomislav pivo, a ujutro i navečer čašicu žestokog pelinkovca. U kavu obavezno *iscijedim* SQUEEZE.1.sg.PresPF pola limuna, i doktor, vjerujte, meni ne treba [...]" [HNK, gs20040327sb29520]

'Every day after meals I drink a bottle of Tomislav beer, while in the morning and in the evening [I drink] a shot of Pelinkovac. In my coffee I squeeze half a lemon by default, and believe me, I don't need any doctor'.

However there seem to be three apparent exceptions to this higher-level constraint applied to present-tensed main clauses. The first one involves the so-called abusive metonymic performatives (Dickey 2015), as shown in (5) below:

(5) Da prevedem na srpsko-hrvatski-bošnjački: *poserem se* SHIT.1.sg.PresPF na svoj život u državi u kojoj ste vi ministar. (Dickey 2015, 254)

'Let me put it in Serbo-Croato-Bosniak: I shit on my life in a state in which you are a minister'.

The second one involves the aspectual marking of a special subtype of running commentaries, live demonstrations, such as in the recipe instructions reported in (6):

(6) *Zapalim* SET ON FIRE.1.sg.PresPF joj kožu na vratu, pa *preklopim* FOLD.1.sg.PresPF na leđa i *učvrstim* FASTEN.1.sg.PresPF čačkalicama. Potom grabilicu *napunim* FILL.1.sg.PresPF rakijom lozovačom, *zagrijem* WARM UP.1.sg.PresPF i *zapalim* SET ON FIRE.1.sg.PresPF te *polijem* POUR.1.sg.PresPF puricu. [HNK, vj20091226pis010]

'I sear the skin [of the turkey] on the neck, then I fold it on the back and I fasten it with toothpicks. Then I fill the ladle with lozovača [home-made grape rakija], warm it up and set it on fire, then I pour it on the turkey'.

The third one involves the possible licensing of PresPF forms in a particular type of nonveridical context featuring the epistemic operator *možda* 'maybe', as in (7):

(7) Nakon teniske karijere, posvetit ću se humanitarnom radu, a možda *nađem* FIND.1.sg.PresPF i ženu s kojom ću zasnovati obitelj, kazao je 31-godišnji Chang. [HNK, vj20030202sp08]
‘After my tennis career is over I’ll devote myself to voluntary work, and maybe find a woman I can start a family with, said the 31-year-old Chang’.

In this paper it is claimed that these three contexts of Pres<sup>PF</sup> use do not constitute an exception to the pattern we regularly find in Štokavian dialects. On the contrary, they can be subsumed under a unified analysis which, building on some theoretical tenets advocated by the so-called neoperformative hypotheses (among others Speas, Tenny 2003), aims at mapping the feature of (cognitive) control in the higher portion of the clausal spine, above CP. The article is structured as follows: in § 2 I will discuss the aforementioned ‘exceptions’ in more detail with regard to the suppression of independent Pres<sup>PF</sup> forms from Štokavian main clauses; in § 3 I will reframe the issue at the syntax-pragmatics interface, providing some evidence for a proper syntacticization of the parameter of (cognitive) control inside SpeechActP; in §4 I will draw some preliminary conclusions.

## 2 Breaking the Law? Anomalous Pres<sup>PF</sup> Forms in Main Clauses

In this section I will address each of the three case studies of this paper: abusive metonymic performatives (§ 2.1), live demonstrations (§ 2.2), and nonveridical contexts featuring *možda* (§ 2.3).

### 2.1 Abusive Metonymic Performatives

The label *abusive metonymic performatives* (henceforth AMP; the term was first coined in Dickey 2015, 254-9; 268-70) applies to a closed class of obscene and disparaging phrases which, although lacking most of the characteristics ascribable to explicit performative utterances,<fnref n="12" /> share some interesting illocutionary similarities

<footnote n="12">12 By explicit performative utterance we define a token of the utterance set U(x), actualising a proposition P(x) with an explicit performative verb in its abstract logical form, which amounts to the action expressed in P(x) when uttered under felicitous circumstances by an agent who is endowed with (or granted) the necessary authority. An explicit performative utterance has to be self-referential, pragmatically felicitous and grammatically well-formed; moreover, it must not satisfy any inherently antiperformative condition. Finally, it has to be categorically defined by the speaker in the speech act event and recognised as such by the hearer (Eckardt 2012, 47-8).</footnote>

<footnote>Unlike AMPs, the prototypical tempo-aspectual form licensed in explicit performative utterances (cf. the commissive illocutionary act exemplified by *obećavati* 'to promise' in (v)) is Pres<sup>mf</sup>, while Pres<sup>mf</sup> forms are regularly ruled out. It should be mentioned, however, that Pres<sup>mf</sup> forms can be opposed by Fut<sup>m</sup>, although only to a limited extent and as long as certain preconditions at the syntax-pragmatic interface (which cannot be explored in detail here) are met:</footnote>
with them as well. In other words, AMPs, which refer to purely resultative eventualities and are typically a main clause phenomenon, do not constitute a simple depiction of the eventuality token actualised in the sentence; they also figuratively perform on the insulted hearer the action that the utterance refers to (hence the term 'metonymic'). Relevant examples of Štokavian AMPs are reported in (5) above and (8) below:

(8) *Nabijem<sub>STICK.1.sq.PresPF</sub> te na kurac!* (Dickey 2000, 200)
'I thrust you onto my cock!'

Although AMPs are coded with *Pres<sup>PF</sup>* forms in other Slavic languages, most notably those of the Western branch (which is in line with the Slavic East-West aspect division laid out in Dickey 2000), such marking stands out as peculiar in BCS. Comparing this usage with some exceptional cases of *Pres<sup>PF</sup>* forms used performatively – both in Old Church Slavonic and Old Slovene – Dickey (2015, 268-70) claims that perfective AMPs should be considered a grammatical archaism inherited from Common Slavic, and credits ‘absolute control of the speaker’ as a key factor for their aspectual marking.

Even though in Dickey (2015) the working definition of ‘absolute control of the speaker’ is not formalised, I have argued elsewhere (Biasio, forthcoming) that the author’s claim is sound, and that there is both historical, formal (i.e. morphosyntactic), as well as even evolutionary evidence to back it up.<fnref n="13" /> It is also worth mentioning that AMPs can neither be coded as *Pres<sup>PF</sup>* in their derogatory, performative-like function (*Nabijam<sub>STICK.1.sq.PresPF</sub> te na kurac* could only report an ongoing event, if any), nor can they be marked with person-number bound indexes different from 1st sg. (*Nabiješ<sub>STICK.2.sq.PresPF</sub> ga na kurac!* or negated (*Ne nabijem<sub>STICK.1.sq.PresPF</sub> te na kurac!*). Additionally, other outrageous expressions that do not denote purely resultative eventualities resist marking with *Pres<sup>PF</sup>* forms: cf. *Jebem<sub>FUCK.1.sq.PresPF</sub> (*Odjebem<sub>FUCK OFF.1.sq.PresPF</sub> /*Zajebem<sub>SCREW UP.1.sq.PresPF</sub>) ti mater 'Fuck you', lit. 'I fuck (*fuck off / *screw up) your mother'. The data seemingly suggests that the parameter of control may play a pivotal role in the aspectual coding of resultative eventualities in egophoric utterances.

<footnote>(v) Navijačima obečavam<sub>PROMISE.1.sq.PresPF</sub> (*obečam<sub>PROMISE.1.sq.PresPF</sub> / 'ću obečati<sub>PROMISE.1.sq.PresPF</sub>*) maksimalno zalaganje, borbu za napad i svaku odbranu i to će, valjda, doneti željeni rezultat. [SrpKor, poli010303.txt, Politika (03 March 2001)]</footnote>

<footnote>'I promise our supporters absolute commitment and a relentless fight for attack and defence and this, I hope, will bring about the desired outcome'.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 Although I believe it is safer to assume that AMPs and other ‘perfective’ performatives in Old Church Slavonic and Old Slovene actually belonged to a general aspect (Biasio, forthcoming), in contemporary BCS such preverbed predicates are unambiguously interpreted as PF.</footnote>
## 2.2 Live Demonstrations

There is a large body of literature concerning the aspectual marking of running commentaries in Slavic languages (cf. among others Galton 1976, 95-7; Dickey 2000, 155-74), which are usually analysed as a peculiar instantiation of the historical present – irrespective of the significant variation they display both in their temporal anchoring and their extradigetic properties. Instead, for the sake of clarity, in this subsection only a particular subset of running commentaries is taken into account, i.e. live demonstrations (experiments, recipes etc.). As Dickey (2000, 161) appropriately points out, live demonstrations are interesting because of their complex temporal nature. Phrased otherwise, they are at the same time both (non-actual) generalisations over a definite set of propositions (possibly built upon a deficient anankastic-oriented model of the type ‘if you want to X, you have to Y’) and the report of their ongoing actualisation in the utterance (i.e. the eventualities are actually unfolding at the UT).

As shown in (6) above and again in (9) below, Pres<sup>PF</sup> forms can be freely licensed in the given context. They can be contextually replaced by PF imperative or infinitive forms (which however constitute different types of speech acts) or even alternate with Pres<sup>IPF</sup> forms, especially with unbounded eventualities. Person-number bound verbal indexes may vary, mostly (but not exclusively) along the conjugation axis 1st p. sg./pl.:<fnref n="14" />

(9) Pecnicu *zagrijemo* <sub>WARM UP.1.pl.PresF<sup>IPF</sup></sub> na 250 stepeni i *pecemo* <sub>BAKE.1.pl.PresF<sup>IPF</sup></sub> lepinje na drugoj od vrha mrezi [...] Pecene lepinje *pokriti* <sub>COVER.InPF<sup>IPF</sup></sub> krpomi i *ostaviti* <sub>LEAVE.InPF<sup>IPF</sup></sub> dese-tak minuta da se ohlade prije rezanja. [sic!] (https://www.coolinarika.com/recept/bosanske-lepinje-f9c5e5f6-63db-11eb-8e23-0242ac120027) ‘We preheat the oven to 250° and bake our buns on the rack (not the one on the top) [...] Cover the baked buns with a cloth and let them cool down for some ten minutes before cutting’.

<footnote n="14">14 Variation in number (e.g. from singular to plural) is likely to be triggered by a different structural configuration of discourse roles, which can be brought about in turn by a variation in the intensity of the illocutionary force assigned to the utterance. For instance, in her analysis of Russian ‘mental performatives’ (i.e. a subclass of expositions which are frequently used to mold the rhetorical structure of written texts and public speeches in order to make them logically consistent, e.g. *opredelit’<sup>vs</sup>* ‘to identify’, *predpoložit’<sup>vs</sup>* ‘to suppose’, *podčerknut’<sup>vs</sup>* ‘to emphasise’ and the like), Rjabceva (1992, 24) argues that the use of the 1st p. pl. of the perfective non-past (*opredelim*..., *predpoložim*..., *podčerknem*) is instrumental in underlining the impositive illocutionary character of such predicates, in that the speaker, while unfolding their reasoning in a step-by-step fashion, expects their addressee(s) to follow the same logical steps and infer the same conclusion(s).</footnote>
Dickey (2000, 168) further notes that in BCS this kind of PF-marked live demonstration cannot be overtly anchored to the UT by means of temporal operators such as sad(a) ‘now’ (here we gloss over some technicalities on the multilayered semantic nature of such deictic elements). For Pres<sup>PF</sup> forms to be licensed, reference needs to be made instead to the steps of the whole procedure as it is performed by the speaker. Moreover, if the eventualities are not presented as bounded, Pres<sup>IPF</sup> forms can replace Pres<sup>PF</sup>, cf. (10):

(10) Najpre *uzmem*<sub>TAKE.1.sg.PresPF</sub> (*uzimam*<sub>TAKE.1.sg.PresIPF</sub>) bocu sodium nitrata i *sipam*<sub>POUR.1.sg.PresPF</sub> sadržinu u retortu; onda *upalim*<sub>LIGHT.1.sg.PresPF</sub> (*palim*<sub>LIGHT.1.sg.PresPF</sub>) Bansenovu lampu i *zagrejem*<sub>WARM UP.1.sg.PresPF</sub> (*zagrejavam*<sub>WARM UP.1.sg.PresIPF</sub>) do tačke ključanja... (Dickey 2000, 168)

'First I take the flask of sodium nitrate and pour the contents into this beaker; then I light the Bunsen burner and heat it to a boil...'

Dickey (2000, 173) goes on to suggest that the ban on the contextual presence of sad(a) alongside PF-marked live demonstrations is linked to the reportive character of the speaker's speech, who would be in control of the flow of the events as they present them to their addressee(s) who are already ordered in a causal chain. Again, then, the aspectual coding of externally and/or internally bounded eventualities in semi-actual contexts seems to be dependent on the role of the point of view (POV) of a sentient individual in egophoric utterances.

## 2.3 Contexts with možda ‘Maybe’

Pres<sup>PF</sup> forms are regularly found in present-tensed main clause environments featuring the epistemic operator možda ‘maybe’, as in (7) above or (11) below. Variation can occur with respect to aspectual marking (unbounded eventualities, or presented as such, can be realized with Pres<sup>IPF</sup> forms) and person-number bound verbal indexes other than 1st p. (sg./pl.), as shown in (12):

(11) Kad je mogao Dule, zašto ne bismo mi koristili taj recpet [sic!]. Možda pozovem<sub>INVITE.1.sg.PresPF</sub> Vujoševića da provede dv amesec a nama. [srWaC.883681.21, #883680]

'If Dule could, why wouldn't we use this recipe? Maybe I can invite Vujošević to spend two months with us'.

(12) Prvo je i osnovno pravilo da sebe učiniš srećnom osobom, da budeš srećan čovek. Onda imaš šanse i nekog drugog da usrećiš, možda napraviš<sub>MAKE.2.sg.PresPF</sub> i odgajiš<sub>RAISE.2.sg.PresPF</sub> neku srećnu decu. [srWaC.1189461.10, #1189460]

'The first and most basic rule is to make yourself a happy person, to be happy. Then you can have chances to make someone else happy, maybe you can make and raise some happy children'.
This type of Pres<sup>PF</sup> use, which is sometimes mentioned in passing even in prescriptive grammars (cf. Barić et al. 1997, 409), is worthy of attention as, unlike AMPs and running commentaries, it involves purely nonveridical contexts, seemingly aligning itself with interrogative-negative structures (cf. (3)) and negative presents (cf. (i)). Should this pattern be consistent, we would expect Pres<sup>PF</sup> forms to be licensed even alongside other epistemic operators semantically akin to možda, such as verovatno<sub>SR</sub> / vjerojatno<sub>HR</sub>, 'probably' or moguće 'possibly', but this is not the case as (13) clearly shows:

(13) - Za sledeći put, i neki vikend... - Da, možda (*verovatno / *moguće*) dođem<sub>COME.1.sg.</sub> Pres<sup>PF</sup> na vikend ovde, da. [srWaC.1128436.4, #1128435]
't - Next time, maybe some weekend... - Yes, maybe I'll come here for a weekend, sure'.

On the basis of (surface) syntactic and prosodic evidence, one could be inclined to look at mòžda as the result of the univerbation of the epistemic modal mòže<sub>CAN.3.sg.PresIPF</sub> (from mòći 'can') and a 'hidden' complementizer da, which, following Veselinović (2019, 46-58), occupies a position in SpecC and takes a clausal complement (much in the spirit of the 'declarative' da proposed in Vrzić 1996).<sup>15</sup> While this may very well account for the diachronic derivation of the operator, it fails to provide a satisfactory structural explanation as it does not provide reasons for the general acceptability of (14a) and (15),<sup>16</sup> nor does it clarify why the same pattern does not hold for vàljda 'probably', 'I guess' (cf. (16)-(18)).<sup>17</sup>

<footnote n="15">15 Note, however, that there is no general agreement on the structure of the clausal architecture in BCS and that alternative hypotheses involving different makeups of the BCS clausal spine have been put forth as well (cf., for instance, Todorović 2012, where it is proposed that the two *da* in BCS are not complementizers *senso strictu*, but rather operators introducing either veridical or nonveridical complements). Note also that Kovačević (2008, 197-202) points out that možda alongside Pres<sup>PF</sup> can license Fut<sup>PF</sup> and Fut<sup>IPF</sup> forms as well (*Možda kupim*<sub>BUY.1.sg.PresPF</sub> / ću kupiti<sub>BUY.1.sg.FutPF</sub> / *budem kupio*<sub>BUY.1.sg.FutIPF.masc.</sub> /-la<sub>1.sg.FutIPF.fem.</sub> kuću na moru). A further analysis of the range of variations within the pattern, particularly in relation to the licensing properties of *valjda*, is left for future research.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 According to my consultants, both (14a) and (15) are quite marginal in literary Štokavian and occur with a relative frequency in oral speech (according to an anonymous reviewer, (14a) occurs most naturally as an elicited answer from a prior context). The majority of the Štokavian native speakers I consulted claimed that (14a) can be better parsed as an elicited answer to a previous context, although there is plenty of evidence for such contexts appearing in isolation as well, cf. (vi) below:</footnote>

<footnote>(vi) Možda da jumbo-plakate *dignemo*<sub>BASE.1.pl.PresPF</sub> i kat više, pa uz onu narodnu "daleko od očiju, daleko od srca", uživamo u nasmiješenim modelima s reklama. [HNK, gs20030701os21879]</footnote>

<footnote>'Maybe we should raise the billboards one floor up and then, in accordance with the old saying "out of sight, out of mind", we enjoy these smiling models from the advertisements'</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 According to my consultants, (16) can be uttered either if kupim<sup>PresPF</sup> is replaced by kupujem<sup>PresPF</sup> or if a relative temporal adverb such as dotad 'by then' is added to the</footnote>
Indeed, *vàljda* displays the same prosodical contour as *mòžda* and can be diachronically derived in a similar manner (i.e. via univerbation of *vàlja* 3.sg.Pres.IPF from *vàljati* ‘to be worth’ and *da*):¹⁸

(14) a. Možda da *kupim*<sup>PresPF</sup> kuću na moru. (Intended: ‘Perhaps I should buy a beach house’)

b. *Može da da kupim*<sup>PresPF</sup> kuću na moru.

(15) Možda može da kupim<sup>PresPF</sup> kuću na moru.

(16) ²/”Valjda kupim<sup>PresPF</sup> kuću na moru. (Intended: ‘I guess I should buy a beach house’)

(17) ³/”Valjda da kupim<sup>PresPF</sup> kuću na moru.

(18) ⁴/”Valjda valja da kupim<sup>PresPF</sup> kuću na moru.

Interestingly, Mirič (2004, 218) points out that in the Serbian variant of the BCS continuum both *možda* and *verovatno* can be used if the realization of the eventuality actualized in the utterance rests entirely on the speaker, while *valjda* implies that such realization is not (completely) under the speaker’s control:

(19) – Hočeš li ti doći večeras? – Možda. / – Verovatno. / – *Valjda.*¹⁹

‘– Are you coming this evening? – Maybe. / – Probably.’

context (the issue why a Pres<sup>IV</sup> form here could be interpreted as a future perfect can-
not be addressed here). (17) and (18) are acceptable only as interrogatives.

18 Although both *možda* and *valjda* can be used either as full modal (epistemic-evi-
dential) operators or parenthetical elements (Zvekić-Dušanović 2019), the two (classes
of) items are still assigned different intonational patterns. However, the difference in
the epistemic commitment associated with the two operators (with *valjda* being epis-
temically weaker and, possibly, doxastically stronger than *možda*) does not seem to af-
fect their syntactic properties.

19 It goes without saying that in (19) *valjda* is not ungrammatical *per se*, however its distribution can only be generalised to contexts where the feature of the speaker’s control is not prominent. In order to better exemplify the contrast between operators I resort to the following example (vii) (I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting it to me):

(vii) Pavlović se nada da nije kraj: Valjda ću odigrati još neki meč za Partizan. (http://beta.admin.mozzartsport.com/fudbal/vesti/pavlovic-se-nada-da-nije-kraj-valjda-cu-odigrati-jos-neki-mec-za-partizan/354132)

'Pavlović hopes this is not the end: I will probably play some more games for Partizan' (⊽ 'I hope / suppose I will play some more games for Partizan, but it does not depend on me').

On a side note, *možda* can also stack together with *valja*, as in the following example (viii):

(viii) Da, možda valja uključiti i moldavski i ukrajinski. (https://twitter.com/srdjan-drago/status/1290913720856698880)

'Yes, probably it is worth including both Moldavian and Ukrainian'.
This would suggest that the licenseability of Pres<sup>Pr</sup> forms is not (exclusively) triggered by either the compositionally derived syntactic properties of *možda* (with reference to, for instance, *vjerojatno<sub>HR</sub>/verovatno<sub>SR</sub>* and *moguće*) or by the nonveridical flavour of the context (cf. the contrast with *valjda*). Another aspect seems to bring *možda*-contexts together with the other case studies under analysis, i.e. the prominent salience of the speaker's control-related POV. In the next section I will elaborate on this idea and argue that control, beside its semantic contribution, is a syntactically relevant element as well.

## 3 Control as a Variable in SpeechActP

The idea that linguistic components traditionally assigned to discourse-related modules (e.g. the role of discourse participants in the speech act event, other logophoric roles, and the notion of POV) should be encoded in the syntactic structure dates back to the early seventies, and would be brought to light some decades later on the basis of consistent crosslinguistic evidence. Speas and Tenny (2003, 320) were among the first to argue for the existence of a separate functional layer above CP, the so-called ‘SpeechActP’, where discourse roles (traditionally, the Speaker and the Hearer) are mapped and defined in terms of their structural positions.

In their joint paper, Speas and Tenny note that the restrictions on the inventory of phenomena linguistically dependent on the POV of a sentient individual tend to be crosslinguistically stable, which may hint at the hybrid (i.e. not entirely pragmatic) nature of the properties of such phenomena. They thus propose a further configurational structure in the scope of SpeechActP, a projection called ‘Evaluation Phrase’, which takes two arguments: the Seat of Knowledge (a “sentient ‘mind,’ who can evaluate, or process, or comment on the truth of a proposition”, p. 332, henceforth SOK), mapped to the specifier position, and the Evidential Phrase, which is linked to the evidential inference(s) on the truth of a given proposition and mapped to the internal argument position (Speas, Tenny 2003, 327-31).

Since Speas and Tenny (2003), there has been much speculation on the exact composition of the inner layer of SpeechActP, including the number of functional projections included within the maximal projected structure and their respective ordering. In this paper I will adopt Zu's (2018, 73 ff., 101-2) slightly revised idea that the SOK appears in the specifier position of a Sentience Phrase and is bound by the base-generated Speaker in declaratives, rhetorical questions and quiz questions. Within this framework, I define cognitive control as the hierarchical and contingent (i.e. not given *a priori*) relation
tion between the Speaker and the Hearer in the speech act event,<fnref n="20" /> which can be modelled as an abstract variable specified at the level of the SOK, checked against by the Speaker (which may or may not be coindexed with the syntactic subject) and spelled out lower in the structure in AspP as PF.

The idea that the cognitive feature of the speaker's control may additionally have a syntactic salience stems from the following two observations. The first one echoes the treatment of speech-style particles and markers of politeness in Korean discussed in detail by Portner, Pak and Zanuttini (2019). Abstracting away from the (quite dense) details of their proposal, by replacing SpeechActP with another functional projection called 'cP' ('c' stands for 'context'), the authors argue that different allocutive pronominal forms, syntactically bound by the Hearer ('Interlocutor' in their terms), are spelled out via an operator-variable relationship mediated by a λ-abstractor type that would reflect the alternation of abstract features on the functional head c (Portner, Pak, Zanuttini 2019, 24-6). Judging from our data sample, control is always related to the Speaker notwithstanding the presence of an actual coindexing of the discourse participant role with the syntactic subject (cf. above (12)). In other words, control always seems to be tightly linked with the expression of the Speaker's POV in egophoric utterances. Following Zu's (2018) account, we can thus assume that in declarative contexts the SOK is always bound by the Speaker and that control, which can be overtly expressed whenever a hierarchical relationship between (at least) two participants in the same speech act event is established, seemingly functions as a variable mediated by a λ-operator at the level of the SOK, as tentatively sketched out in (20):

(20) [SpeechActP[Speaker[senP[specSenSOK[senλcon]]]]]

The second observation boils down to the correlation between control and perfective morphology. Dickey's (2000, 25-7) classical proposal of a Slavic East-West aspect division on the basis of the prototypical meaning assigned to PF places BCS in a transitional zone, with Štokavian varieties sharing more commonalities with the Eastern group. The crucial point here is that control can be seen as a contextually determined effect stemming from the aspectual semantic core of PF in Eastern Slavic languages, namely temporal definiteness, i.e. the assignment of an eventuality to a uniquely determined point on the time axis, over which the speaker would then yield full control (Dickey 2018). If we assume that in Štokavian the variable

<footnote n="20">20 A comprehensive discussion of the pragmatic variables of the participant structure lies beyond the scope of the present paper.</footnote>
for control is specified at the level of the SOK and thus bound by the Speaker, it is possible to claim that the SOK enters an agreement relation with the aspectual projection at a distance (much like probe-goal agreement), consequently triggering the spell-out of the morphological element(s) associated with PF.<fnref n="21" /> If this hypothesis is indeed on the right track, an example like (21a) would then have the structural representation in (21b) (note that only the relevant projections of the clausal spine are featured below):

<figure><img src="image_15.png" /></figure>

## 4 Conclusions

In this paper, I presented a unified analysis for several contexts featuring the (apparently) anomalous licensing of Pres<sup>FF</sup> forms in BCS present-tensed main clauses, i.e. abusive metonymic performatives (§ 2.1), live demonstrations (§ 2.2), and nonveridical contexts with *možda* (§ 2.3) *inter alia*. I claimed that for all these cases the feature of (cognitive) control, which can be defined in terms of the hierarchical relation between the Speaker and the Hearer – and thus encoded in the syntactic structure as an abstract variable at the level of the SOK in SpeechActP – bears special relevance. The association between control and perfective morphology can be modelled in terms of a probe-goal agreement between the SOK and the aspectual projection and can be explained as a semantic extension of the prototypical function assigned to PF in the Štokavian varieties of the BCS continuum, i.e. temporal definiteness.

Regrettably, a number of pertinent questions could not be answered in this survey. For instance, it remains unclear why Pres<sup>FF</sup> forms cannot be licensed in similar semi-actual contexts, whereby control is also shown to play a significant role, e.g. performative utterances (cf. (v)).<fnref n="22" /> Furthermore, the role of verbal tenses (more spe-

<footnote n="21">21 It is important to mention that in BCS an eventuality can be realised as PF only if it is externally and/or internally bounded. Internal boundedness here corresponds to what is commonly labelled ‘(inherent) telicity’ (resultativity). Externally bounded eventualities do not need to be telic.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22 It may be the case that, differently from AMPs, the temporal anchoring of performative utterances is assigned a different ordering with reference to the UT. It may also be the case that in regular performative utterances such as (v) the hierarchical relation between the speaker and the hearer is modelled in a slightly different fashion with reference to AMPs, with the speaker still yielding control over the eventuality in their scope (domain) yet being unable to intrude in the hearer’s domain and take</footnote>
cifically, the aorist and the two future tenses) and their interaction with the higher layer of the syntactic structure should be taken into greater consideration. Finally, dialectal internal variation should be reviewed more thoroughly so as to reinforce the core principles of the main argument. All these issues and their interplay are thus worthy topics for future research.

List of abbreviations

<table><tr><td>Aor<sup>FF</sup></td><td>perfective aorist</td></tr><tr><td>fem</td><td>feminine</td></tr><tr><td>Fut<sup>FF</sup></td><td>perfective future</td></tr><tr><td>Fut<sup>IPF</sup></td><td>perfective future perfect</td></tr><tr><td>HNK</td><td>Hrvatski nacionalni korpus</td></tr><tr><td>HR</td><td>Croatian</td></tr><tr><td>Inf</td><td>infinitive</td></tr><tr><td>IPF</td><td>imperfective</td></tr><tr><td>masc</td><td>masculine</td></tr><tr><td>p</td><td>person</td></tr><tr><td>PF</td><td>perfective</td></tr><tr><td>pl</td><td>plural</td></tr><tr><td>POV</td><td>point of view</td></tr><tr><td>Pres<sup>PF</sup></td><td>perfective present</td></tr><tr><td>Pres<sup>IPF</sup></td><td>imperfective present</td></tr><tr><td>sg</td><td>singular</td></tr><tr><td>SOK</td><td>Seat of Knowledge</td></tr><tr><td>SR</td><td>Serbian</td></tr><tr><td>SrpKor</td><td>Korpus savremenoga srpskog jezika</td></tr><tr><td>srWaC</td><td>Serbian Web Corpus</td></tr><tr><td>UT</td><td>Utterance Time</td></tr></table>

it over completely (Dickey, personal communication). I am grateful to Stephen Dickey for the fruitful discussion on these data.
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<figure><img src="image_16.png" /></figure>
# On the Diachrony of the Clitic Cluster in Bulgarian

Tsvetana Dimitrova
Institute for Bulgarian Language, Sofia

**Abstract** The article traces back the formation of the clitic cluster in Bulgarian starting from the Old Church Slavonic through Middle Bulgarian up to the Early Modern Bulgarian and beyond. It offers a hypothetical two-layer structure of the cluster – with the main layer consisting of a (pronominal) core and a (verbal) periphery, and a secondary layer hosting (‘quasi-clitical’) elements that exhibit, both diachronically and synchronically, a behaviour that is not strictly consistent with that of the clitical elements. The language material from three corpora shows that there was no change in the positions of the elements in the core, while the observed changes in the periphery are mainly due to changes in the set of the elements (as a result of the restructuring of the pronoun system and changes in the auxiliary system, as well as the loss of some early clitics, such as the discourse markers).

**Keywords** Bulgarian language. Clitics. Clitic cluster. Diachrony. Corpora.

**Summary** 1 Introduction. – 2 Clitics in Bulgarian. – 3 Clustering: The History. – 3.1 Discourse Clitics. – 3.2 Pronominal Clitics. – 3.3 Verbal Clitics and Clitic-Like Elements.

<figure><img src="image_17.png" /></figure>

Edizioni
Ca' Foscari

**Peer review**

Submitted 2021-07-21
Accepted 2021-10-15
Published 2020-12-20

**Open access**

© 2021 | © Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License

<figure><img src="image_18.png" /></figure>

**Citation** Dimitrova, T. (2021). "On the Diachrony of the Clitic Cluster in Bulgarian", *Balcania et Slavia*, 1(1), 67-96.
# 1 Introduction

Slavic clitics have been the focus of attention in a number of works in the recent decades (Franks, King 2000; Franks 2017; Zimmerling 2013; Migdalski 2016; among many others), with accounts also on the diachrony of cliticization in (one or more) Slavic languages.<fnref n="1" />

The diachrony of the Bulgarian clitics has drawn particular interest because Bulgarian is part of the Balkan *Sprachbund* and as such it exhibits verb-adjacent cliticization pattern, but also because it displays various patterns in its history.<fnref n="2" /> Although it has been claimed that the position of clitics in Old Church Slavonic (OCS)<fnref n="3" /> texts mostly echoes their placement in the Greek originals, there are numerous exceptions reflecting patterns in the language of the scribes (especially in constructions without parallels in Greek; see Sławski 1946, among others). In her seminal study on the clitics in the history of Bulgarian, Pancheva (2005) argues that verb-adjacent clitics found in Old Bulgarian (and OCS) temporarily switched to second-position (up to and beyond the Middle Bulgarian period), only to become verb-adjacent again (in modern Bulgarian). Migdalski (2016) claims that in the majority of cases pronominal clitics in OCS were verb-adjacent while the second position (2P) was obligatory only for the so-called 'operator' clitics (discourse markers and 'ethical datives'); he relates the verb-adjacency to the presence of tense morphology in a language.

The discussion in the present article is based on data excerpted from manuscripts that presumably reflect the diachrony of the Bulgarian language and are closer to the vernacular than to the literary language. The main aim of the article is to sketch the evolvement of the (sentential) clitic cluster in the history of Bulgarian and to check

Part of the work presented in the article was performed within the Russian-Bulgarian bilateral project *Evolution of the Grammatical Structure in Russian and Bulgarian Languages in a Contrastive Context: Corpus Analysis and Formal Grammars*. The Bulgarian part has been financially supported by the Fund of Scientific Research at the Ministry of Education and Science with a contract N02/2 from 14.06.2018. A version of the text was presented at the 25th annual conference *Derzhavin Readings* in March 2020, within the section "Contemporary and Historical Problems of Bulgarian and Slavic Studies" (with a short paper included in the proceedings). I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of the present article for the constructive comments, as well as Andrej Bojadžiev for the discussion of some points and Iliyana Krapova for the extensive comments and suggestions. Needless to say, the Author is solely responsible for all the remaining errors.

<footnote n="1">1 Sławski 1946; Radanović-Kocić 1988; Pancheva 2005; Kosek 2011; Zimmerling 2013; Migdalski 2013; 2016.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Sławski 1946; Pancheva 2005; Zimmerling 2013; Migdalski 2013; 2016.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 Here I will use the term Old Church Slavonic (OCS), which reflects the status of the language as used by the Slavic orthodox community (cf. Bujukliev et al. 1993). However, the linguistic features of the texts in the monuments are assumed to reflect those of Old Bulgarian.</footnote>
whether there has been a significant change in the clustering pattern. The observations on this specific set of data confirm the old hypothesis that the clitics in Bulgarian are (and were) verb-adjacent (and also target 2P). The necessary ramification here is that any conclusions based on heterogeneous diachronic data highly depend on the sources and their analysis. The notion 'second position', for example, depends on syntactic constituency within the language and on the interpretation of the data that are taken into account. With diachronic texts, the segmentation is also a matter of interpretation: for the OCS data here, the texts were already segmented within the corpus used for reference; with the other data (Middle Bulgarian and Early Middle Bulgarian), however, segmentation was done aside. The difficulties with the specifics of the data remain: with the OCS data I have tried to consider variant readings if accessible, with interesting results;<fnref n="4" /> this should be done over all the data if possible (for example, one should consider variant readings within the texts of the damaskin collections). In order for such a task to be accomplished, however, one needs a really big and smartly annotated corpus, which is unfortunately missing at this time.

## 2 Clitics in Bulgarian

To define 'what a clitic is' is not a trivial task because, as Franks (2017, 146) puts it, "the idiosyncrasies of clitics all go in the same direction, i.e., a *negative* one". It is easier to say what clitics are not rather than what they are, because they are – prosodically, morphologically, lexically, and syntactically – 'deficient'. Firstly, clitics are prosodically deficient as they do not have an independent stress, but form a prosodic unit with another, prosodically 'strong', word. However, in many languages clitics may host the stress when preceding or following other elements that remain prosodically 'weak' (or may receive secondary stress). In present-day standard Bulgarian, clitics may bear stress after negation as in (1) (there is also a hypothesis for a secondary stress here; Krăsteva (2020, 119), on the basis of experimental data, claims that in interrogative sentences with negation, even when the clitics receive stress, they do not have "an independent intonational peak").

<footnote n="4">4 A more detailed review cannot be supplied here but ca. 43% of the occurrences of the derivatives *mi 'I.DAT' and tu 'you.DAT'* in Codex Marianus (CM) have variant readings in other New Testament (NT) texts as witnessed in Codex Zographensis (CZ), Codex Assemani (CA) and Codex Sabbae (CSb), and/or in the respective Greek editions.</footnote>
(1)

<table><tr><td>Не_му</td><td>даде</td><td>книгата,</td><td>нали?</td></tr><tr><td>NEG' _he. DAT</td><td>gave</td><td>book. the</td><td>right</td></tr></table>

* The following abbreviations are used in the glosses: NEG, negative particle; EMPH, emphatic particle, e.g. же; NOM, nominative; GEN, genitive; DAT, dative; ACC, accusative; RefLCL, СА; Ref POSSCL, СИ; DEF, word form with a definite article; COP, copula; AUX, auxiliary; COND, conditional; INF, infinitive; IND, indicative; AOR, aorist; IMPF, imperfect; RENARR, renarrative; SUBJ, subjunctive. The elements at focus are given in bold.

Secondly, clitics are a 'bag' of grammatical features (Sadock 1991) and do not have lexico-conceptual features, i.e. they are also semantically deficient (Franks 2017, 154). Historically, the short dative forms of the first- and second-person singular pronouns ми 'I, DAT' and ти 'you. DAT' were already clitics in Old Bulgarian/OCS (as were the parallel pronouns in Greek, see Wackernagel 2009; Večerka 1989; 1993); other short pronominal forms, however, became clitics as a result of early attrition: 3pSg masculine accusative е-го (ю-го)<fnref n="5" /> 'he.ACC' > го 'he.ACC', with further reconsideration of г- as a third-person marker resulting in a generalised third-person plural with the ending -и (ги 'they.ACC'); еж/е > ж > я 'she.ACC' (3pSg feminine accusative); емо > моу 'he.DAT' (3pSg masculine and neuter dative), еи > ей > й 'she.DAT' (3pSg feminine dative), etc.; see Byjukliev et al. 1991, 234-6; Mirčev 1963, 165-6).

Thirdly, clitics are syntactically dependent although different elements may exhibit different behaviour. Clitics can be categorised into 'simple' (non-paradigmatic) and 'special' (paradigmatic) (Zwicky 1977; 1985): in present-day Bulgarian, the latter are present-tense auxiliaries/copulas, short forms of personal and possessive pronouns, which have corresponding 'full' (prosodically and syntactically 'strong') forms.

Clitics are known for their ability to clusterise – in some languages the clitic cluster has a fixed position in the clause or in the phrase (in standard Bulgarian these are the 'special' clitics and the 'simple' interrogative ли). The so-called Wackernagel clitics in Indo-European languages were all second-position (2P) clitics. At issue here would be the definition of the second position: whether the clitic is positioned after the first word in the sentence, as originally formulated by Wackernagel (2009), or after the first syntactic constituent (including a phrasal one) (Halpern 1995), or after the first constituent that immediately follows the so-called rhythmic-syntactic barrier of Zaliznjak (2008). Zaliznjak introduced this barrier as an ad-

<footnote n="5">5 Orthographic variants throughout the text are generalised if possible (e.g. ero = erw; ми = ми etc.), except for certain examples. The same is true for jotated variants (i.e. ero is given instead of юро etc.).</footnote>
ditional (and obligatory) condition to make the Wackernagel effect work for the Old Russian clitics. Additionally, the restrictions known as the Tobler-Mussafia's law (Tobler 1875; Mussafia 1888), originally formulated for the Romance languages, do not allow 'special' clitics to be first in the sentence.

All these constraints are partially valid for present-day standard Bulgarian: clitics are mostly verb-adjacent, and are found either after the verb in the first position in the clause, as in (2a), or before the verb if there is another constituent in first position, as in (2b). Although (2c) is ungrammatical with clitics following both the subject and the verb and coming third in the linear order of the clause, clitics can still be found further up in the clause following more than one constituent, as in (2d). Clitics may also land third after a preceding verb that, however, is analysed as first after the rhythmic-syntactic barrier (with other sentential element to its left), as in (2e).

(2) a.

<table><tr><td>Даде</td><td>му</td><td>я</td><td>Иван</td><td>книгата</td></tr><tr><td>gave</td><td>he.DAT</td><td>she.ACC</td><td>Ivan</td><td>book.DEF</td></tr></table>

b.

<table><tr><td>Иван</td><td>му</td><td>я</td><td>даде</td><td>книгата</td></tr><tr><td>Ivan</td><td>he.DAT</td><td>she.ACC</td><td>gave</td><td>book.DEF</td></tr></table>

c.

<table><tr><td>*Иван</td><td>даде</td><td>му</td><td>я</td><td>книгата</td></tr><tr><td>*Ivan</td><td>gave</td><td>he.DAT</td><td>she.ACC</td><td>book.DEF</td></tr></table>

d.

<table><tr><td>B</td><td>събота</td><td>изненадващо</td><td>Иван</td><td>му</td><td>я</td><td>даде</td><td>книгата</td></tr><tr><td>In</td><td>Saturday</td><td>surprisingly</td><td>Ivan</td><td>he.DAT</td><td>she.ACC</td><td>gave</td><td>book.DEF</td></tr></table>

e.

<table><tr><td>Да,</td><td>даде</td><td>му</td><td>я</td><td>книгата</td><td>Иван</td></tr><tr><td>Yes,</td><td>gave</td><td>he.DAT</td><td>she.ACC</td><td>book.DEF</td><td>Ivan</td></tr></table>

According to Zimmerling (2013, 89), there are different language systems regarding the position of the clitics, and Bulgarian belongs to the class of languages with so-called 'extended WP+ system', in which the clustering clitics are expected to be verb-adjacent or rather the verb in sentences with 2P clitics is expected to be clitic-adjacent, i.e.
the positional constraint here is both on the clitic(s) and on the verb.<fnref n="6" />
In addition, the clustering clitics are in more or less fixed position
relative to the clause boundary - generally second after an element
in complementiser position (conjunctions, wh-words, other relativ-
isers, etc.) or following the first constituent that comes immediate-
ly after the so-called rhythmic-syntactic barrier of Zaliznjak (2008).

The following considerations are applicable for the discussion that
follows. In the article, I assume that second-position of the clitics is
the position following: (a) a specific set of conjunctions (да 'то', че
'that', ѣко 'as', аште 'if', ами 'but'); (b) wh-words; (c) other relativis-
ers (дето, де, щото 'that, which'); (d) a constituent in focus or top-
ic; or (e) verbal element in first position. Sentential constituents lo-
cated outside the boundary of the clause such as vocatives and some
extra-sentential particles do not count as first position. Different-
ly from other Slavic languages, clitics in Bulgarian cannot be found
first in the sentence, and in spite of some exceptions in historical
texts, Bulgarian clitics in general comply with the Tobler-Mussafia's
law if and only if the latter applies to the clause and not to the lev-
el of the intonational phrase (i.e. relative to the rhythmic-syntactic
barrier of Zaliznjak (2008). In what follows, we will see that these
considerations are also valid for the history of Bulgarian in spite of
some counter-examples.

3 Clustering: The History

The hypothesis probed in the article is that the order of the elements
within the cluster is a follow-up on the diachronic development of ele-
ments targeting the second position, from left to right. Thus, the old-
est clitics (2P) would be on the far left (or first) of the clustering el-
ements, while the newest ones would land on the (far) right. Beside
the special clitics and the discourse clitics, elements that are found
around the cluster and are considered (semi-)part of it by some au-
thors (see more in Zaliznjak 2008), are: the interrogative clitic ли,
which is found on the far left but also, given that it does not impose
any syntactic restrictions on the preceding element, it may show up
after each of the other elements in the cluster; the old adverbial par-
ticles и 'and', той 'then'; and the adverbs пакъ, пакы 'again'.

<footnote n="6">6 As one of the reviewers rightly put it “a decisive factor could be the position of the verb, and in that scenario the second position requirement is irrelevant”, although there are still some exceptions, though obscure or stylistically marked.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 These form prosodic words (linked by ) with the clitics in some texts – in fact, in these positions, the clitics are part of the first prosodic complex: DLv (17th c.; Mladen-ova, Velčeva 2013): *дето_му_се* даде бояла обномъзи влѣку, щото е серà àntихрість. й_да_се поклонать влѣку, че_му_е работата като на _влѣкъ.</footnote>
Not all clustering elements in present-day Bulgarian show similar behaviour. Monosyllabic auxiliaries, other than the present-tense ones, such as the conditional би 'would', the past-tense бе 'was/were', the future ще 'will/shall', may also appear first in the clause. Both in present-day standard Bulgarian and in the historical data observed in the article, these auxiliaries may be found either to the left or to the right of the pronominal elements (the short forms of dative and accusative personal pronouns, the short forms of possessive personal pronouns, which have the same form as the dative personal ones, and the short reflexive pronouns - accusative се and dative си). Within the cluster, the pronominal clitics appear in a fixed order with respect to one another: the dative always precedes the accusative (with reflexives behaving in a parallel way), while the present-tense auxiliaries show a split behaviour: all persons except third person singular show up to the left of the pronominals, while the third-person singular auxiliary (e'is.3pSg') shows up to its right.

In the present article, I propose that the cluster is composed of a primary layer and a secondary one. The primary layer is further split into a core (pronominal) and a periphery (verbal). This is also historically motivated as the auxiliary clitics have joined the clustering elements later (present-tense auxiliary clitics are derived via attrition to the left or to the right of the remaining elements: first-person singular e-смъ > съм 'am.1pSg'; second-person singular е-си > си 'are.2pSg'; third-person singular е-стъ > е 'is.3pSg'; third-person plural съ-тъ > са 'are.3pPl'). The secondary layer hosts elements that are clitic-adjacent such as past-tense auxiliaries whose position also varies as in (3a) vs. (3b), as well as the conditional (see Nicolova 2008).

(3) a.

Иван **бе/беше/бил** **му** **го** **дал.**
Ivan **be.AOR/IMPF/RENARR** **he.DAT** **he.ACC** **given**

b.

Иван **му** **го** **бе/беше/бил** **дал.**
Ivan **he.DAT** **he.ACC** **be.AOR/IMPF/RENARR** **given**

In the pattern in (4), the primary layer is in bold. Some dialects have retained only present-tense AUX2, i.e. the verbal clitic is to the right (Antonova-Vasileva et al. 2016, map 144).

(4) (QU) (AUXO) **AUX1 DAT ACC AUX2** (AUX +)

The ordering in (4) illustrates the overall pattern in present-day standard Bulgarian and if we are to judge by the data discussed be-
low, it has undergone relatively few changes, which have rather affected the inventory of the elements that may appear in the respective slots rather than the pattern.

The earliest 2P clitics in Old Bulgarian/OCS are the discourse markers *же* and *бо* (the latter, however, was lost early). The pronominal clitics, which presumably joined the cluster at a later point and which build the core of the primary layer also in the history of Bulgarian, can be classified into several subclasses depending on their placement within the cluster: (1) the dative first-person singular *ми 'I.DAT'* and second-person singular *ти 'you.DAT'*; (2) the short forms of anaphoric pronouns (which would be later reanalysed as third-person pronouns): *и 'he.ACC'* (masculine singular; neuter and feminine dual), *а 'she.ACC'* (feminine singular), *е 'it.ACC'* (neuter singular), *а 'they.ACC'* (plural, masculine and feminine), *ѣ/я 'they.DU'* (neuter plural; masculine dual); the accusative short forms of the first- and second-person singular personal pronouns *ма 'I.ACC'* and *та 'you.ACC'* (and, possibly, plurals and duals), defined as semi-clitics (Vaillant 1948, 262; Večerka 1989, 42) as they may occur in 'strong' positions – after a preposition and (rarely) at the beginning of a sentence; and reflexives *са (accusative) and си (dative)*, also found after prepositions; (3) in later texts, the inventory expands with third-person singular datives *мoy 'he.DAT'* (masculine and neuter) and *й 'she.DAT'* (feminine) derived from the earlier dative short forms *емой and еи that also tend to appear more or less adjacent to the position of the cluster in earlier texts.

Both historically and in present-day Bulgarian, verbal elements ('connectors'; Zimmerling 2013) among the clustering elements are located in the periphery of the primary layer and display variation in placement with respect to other clustering elements in that they can occupy either *aux1 or aux2* in (5) below. These are: the monosyllabic auxiliaries of *быти* (optative *бѣ/би 'would'*, aorist *бы 'was/were. AOR'*; imperfect *бѣ 'was/were.IMPF'*, which, however, may be found also in first position); the future auxiliary *ще/щеъ 'will/shall'* (with variants *ке, хте, че, etc.*) appearing not earlier than Middle Bulgarian; present-tense auxiliaries and their successors: *есмь (съм, смь) 'am.1pSg', еси (си) '2pSg', 3pSg естъ (е) 'is.3Sg', есме (сме) 'are.1pPl', есте (сте) 'are.2pPl', скать (ска, са) 'are.3pPl'.

The interrogative clitic *ли* (to the far left in both (4) and (5)) and adverbial particles are part of the secondary layer. These are: *ти 'and', и 'and', пак(ь) 'again', той 'then', etc.* The adverbs may show up on both sides of the primary layer, as indicated by the two positions of ADV in (5).

The pattern in (5) gives the relative order of the elements that tend to clusterise as witnessed in the earliest historical texts. With some changes, this order correlates with the one that has been observed by Zaliznjak (2008, 82) in the Novgorod charters. Note that not all elements that appear in bold in (5) are necessarily clitics; as will be seen below, some of them are semi-clitics, while others are clitic-like.