engleski

Auxiliaries in Serbian/Croatian and English

Auxiliary verbs (incl. copula be) in English show similar properties to their Serbian/Croatian (S/C) counterparts: both have one weak (contracted/enclitic) form and two strong forms (positive/negative). In this paper we analyse further similarities between these languages, concerning distributional restrictions on weak forms: a. word order (the weak form surfaces higher in the clause than strong forms) ; b. the ban on weak forms in certain sentence types (negation, yes-no questions, etc.). We pursue the idea that English contracted auxiliaries are instances of “ second position” syntactic clitics, offering evidence that they instantiate the same basic phenomenon as the clitic auxilaries of S/C. Further, we argue that the English do-support phenomenon is a closely related phenomenon. The second part of the paper outlines a unitary analysis of the syntax of the auxiliary system of the two languages, in which the functional head S plays a central role.

syntax, generative grammar, Croatian, clitics

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