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Verba Dicendi in Croatian Church Slavonic

The semantic frame of verba dicendi includes: the speaker ; the addressee ; the topic ; the benefactor ; the information, and sometimes the instrument. The aim of this paper is to describe the syntactic realization of these roles in Croatian Church Slavonic. The speaker, whose referent is typically human, is in active sentences usually realized as a subject in the nominative case. In passive sentences it is realized as a genitive complement of the preposition ot 'from, of', less frequently as a locative complement of the preposition po ‘by’, or as the instrumental without preposition. With most of the surveyed verbs the addressee can be expressed as an indirect object in the dative, with or without the preposition kь ‘to’. The exception is the verb prositi ‘beg, request, ask’, as well as its derivatives such as vprašati/vprositi ‘ask, question’, with which this role is realized either as a direct object in the accusative or as a PP consisting of u ‘in’ + accusative, or ot + genitive. The addressee of the verb vьzvati ‘call (out)’ can be expressed either as a PP consisting of kь + dative, or as a direct object in the accusative. With the verb vzьpiti ‘cry out’ this role can be expressed by kь+ dative, as well as by protiv ‘against’ + dative. The topic is most often realized as a PP consisting of o ‘about’ + locative or ot + genitive. Quite exceptionally, it can be expressed by ob ‘round, about’ + locative. With verbs otgovarati, otveĉati 'answer, reply' and vprašati/vprositi this role can also be realized as a PP consisting of na 'on' + accusative or kь + dative. With the verb vzьpiti this role can also be expressed by nad 'over' + instrumental. The fact that the speech is directed against somebody is indicated by the PP consisting of na + accusative or protiv(u) + dative. If it is necessary to stress for whose benefit one speaks, this can be done by a PP consisting of za ‘for’ + accusative, but with the verb prositi it can also be achieved by an indirect object in the dative. As expected, the instrument is usually expressed by an NP in the instrumental case, or less frequently by a PP consisting of po + locative. The information, which is typically the complement of the verb of speaking, can be either nominal or clausal in structure. The nominal complement is either a direct object NP in the accusative or a predication consisting of an accusative NP (DP) followed by a participial construction which agrees with it in gender, number and case. Clausal complements can be finite or infinitival. The information can further be presented either as direct or as indirect speech. Therefore the author identifies the distinguishing features of direct and indirect speech in Croatian Church Slavonic. It is shown that Croatian Church Slavonic belongs to the languages with a speech report continuum, where some constructions display features of both direct and indirect speech. Direct and indirect speech in Croatian Church Slavonic do not differ in their position relative to the reporting verb. In both cases, the reporting verb may precede or follow the speech report, and in both cases the speech report may be discontinuous, i.e. parenthesis is possible in both cases.

Croatian Church Slavonic language; verbs of speaking; semantic frame; direct speech; indirect speech

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