Wackernagel's Looking Glass: The Mirror Principle and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian Adjectival Long-Form Allomorphy

Abstract

This paper is a comprehensive investigation of the historical rise and contemporary usage patterns of Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian adjectival long-form allomorphy (ALFA). ALFAs include the sets of the genitive and dative/locative case allomorphs, -og/-oga and -om/-ome/-omu, respectively. First, from my diachronic research, I find the sudden inclusion of ALFAs in Croatian grammars shortly following the Vienna Literary Agreement of 1850. This evidence, coupled with the early attestation of ALFAs in Old Serbian (Belić 1969), as I claim in Pennington 2010, suggests that ALFAs may have been brought to Croatian dialects via Serbian refugees who fled westward to escape Ottoman (and Muslim) rule. From my synchronic research, I find a clear correlation between a preceding preposition and the addition of long-forms to pronominal adjectives. I link this phenomenon to the similar requirement for full form pronouns following prepositions, given the high level of semantic and syntactic features shared by pronouns and pronominal adjectives (see Sugamoto 1989). Finally, taking into account the general Indo-European trend to place pronouns and other “stressless” elements in the second position in a sentence found in Indo-European languages (à la Wackernagel 1892), and moreover, applying Mark Baker's Mirror Principle (1985), which is a statement on the regularity in the similarity of independent syntactic and morphological derivation processes to one another, I claim that ALFAs arose historically and continue to persist (even in Serbian) as extra syllables that may nor may not still have an anaphoric component (in the absence of a following noun) but most certainly serve to create a bi-syllabic form for pronominal adjectives when following stressless prepositions, an analogical extension of the sentential Wackernagel's Law to pronominal adjectival prepositional phrases. While in Serbian this rule is limited to pronominal adjectives, in Croatian it has been analogically extended to the adjectival class as a whole.