Serbo-Croatian coordinative conjunctions at the syntax-semantics interface

Abstract

In this paper, I present five major Serbo-Croatian conjunctions, and argue that they differ in semantic as well as morphological complexity. I provide a compositional analysis of the morphological make-up of the arguably morphologically complex conjunctions, and establish a mapping between the two scales of their complexity. I argue that the Serbo-Croatian i is the most primitive conjunction, involving a bare addition, without any special syntactic, semantic or information-structural constraints. All other analyzed conjunctions: the disjunctive ili, the negative ni, the oppositive a and the adversative ali are more complex, they involve information-structural restrictions, and some of them also additional, polarity-related elements. For this reason, I argued that these other conjunctions are all restricted to coordinating bigger structural units: those rich enough to involve polarity- and information structure-related components, or more precisely PolPs, MoodPs or CPs. Part of the analysis is a novel view at the syntactic and semantic properties of the Serbo-Croatian clitic li, defining it as an element that pairs up an unvalued polarity feature with a focal element in its scope. One consequence of the proposed analysis is a compositional derivation of disjunctive coordination instead of taking disjunction as a cognitive and linguistic primitive.