Factors contributing to phrase splittin...

Under certain circumstances clitic(s) (CLs) can be inserted into a semantically and syntactically tightly connected phrase, as in example (1). The phenomenon is known by the term phrase splitting.

For almost a hundred years phase splitting has been attracting considerable attention from both normativists and formal linguists. Early on, it was recognized as a feature which distinguishes Serbian from Croatian. However, scholarly discussion of this phenomena in literature is based mainly on very few examples, which have been evaluated by a limited number of people. Not surprisingly, this approach has caused many contradictory statements. Nevertheless, not all phrase types are equally controversial. The most controversial phrase types are noun and its nominal attribute in genitive, first and last name, noun with its modifier in a PP, and conjoined NPs. Since I share Alexander’s (2009: 50) opinion that there is still a great need to prove the degree of acceptability of different types of phrase splitting, I intend to pursue corpus linguistic studies. This study addresses following research question: Which role in splitting noun from its nominal attribute in genitive (ex. (2)) and first from the last name (ex. (3)) have phrase type, phrase case, variety type (Croatian vs Serbian), CL type, and CL number? 

The data will be extracted from {bs, hr, sr}WaC (Ljubešić & Klubička 2014).