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Problem of the Croatian Church Slavonic “complex” adjectival suffixes from diachronic perspective: Extended base, suffix or adjective as a whole?

In Croatian Church Slavonic there are not as many complex suffixes as it seems. Namely, only two of them (-ovьn- and -ovit-) were separated from the base with which they originally emerged and became, after reanalysis, independent derivational units. However, this is not easy to determine in all instances since these suffixes are diachronically connected with the Proto-Slavic ŭ-stems (Mihaljević 2014). Thus the sequence ov may be both derivational (i.e. the suffix -ov-) and inflectional (i.e. < *ou), sharing the same origin (Matthews 1991). The problem of determining whether the sequence ov in particular case is inflectional or derivational derives from the fact that it is not entirely certain which nouns belonged to Proto-Slavic ŭ-stems, due to insufficient number of attestations that would undoubtedly prove it. Scholars frequently mention six nouns attested in Old Church Slavonic that are commonly considered as original Proto-Slavic ŭ-stems (cf. e.g. Hamm 1974). However, it is important to note two things: first, only two of them are declined in Old Church Slavonic exclusively according to the ŭ-stems, and second, this does not imply that all the case forms are attested. In fact, only two or three forms are usually attested, most commonly the genitive and locative singular ending -u (which significantly affected Slavic nominal morphology). Furthermore, authors (e.g. Vondrák 1924, Ekkert 1959, Brodowska-Honowska 1960, Feuillet 2018) also include some other nouns in this group, on the basis of attestations of these particular forms. But the point is that the endings of this declension type penetrated into other declension types. This is confirmed by nouns that, based on comparative data (from Latin, Lithuanian, etc.), can not be considered as original ŭ-stems, and yet in Old Church Slavonic have some endings from that paradigm. Almost all nouns that served as bases for derivation of adjectives with the sequence ov, are attested in Old Church Slavonic texts with the ending -u in the genitive singular. Therefore, regardless of a questionable extent to which attestations of the ŭ-declension really prove that a particular noun belonged to the ŭ-stems, this noun could still be interpreted in that fashion by speaker or scribe. The aim of this paper is to present current views on this issue rarely addressed in Slavic studies (Vondrák 1924 ; Brodowska-Honowska 1960 ; Vaillant 1974 ; Efimova 2006 ; Sudec 2010) and interpret data from the selected corpus in terms of diachronic morphology (Bauer 2002 ; Bauer 2003).

diachronic morphology, reanalysis, adjectives, inflection vs. derivation

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