O strukturi sloga u srpskom jeziku

Cilj ovog rada je formalna analiza sloga u srpskom jeziku. Principi koje predlažemo pozivaju se na sonornost glasova, svojstvo koje bitno utiče na njihovu poziciju unutar sloga. Ovim principima reguliše se vezivanje segmenata za periferne delove sloga, uzlaz i kodu, kao i za njegov centralni deo, u kojem element nižeg reda, mora, vezuje najsonornije glasove u slogu i, ujedno, služi i kao mera njegove težine.

Clitics in South Slavic Languages: The View from the Interfaces

This paper analyses the placement of clitics that occupy the so-called second position in Serbian, in which both the first word or the first constituent can serve as host positions for clitics. In both corpus investigations and experimental research, we found that in Serbian there is more than one type of first position, both in the case of first word, and in the case of first constituent. Moreover, we found two types of cases depending on whether the sentence initial element is, or belongs to, either an argument or the predicate, yielding a four part classification. The experiments clearly establish preferred clitic placement in the two types of sentences. All four types are represented both in the investigated corpora and in the production and perception patterns, albeit in very different proportions. We attribute these differences to different discourse conditions between the first word and first phrase positions within each category

Getting in the first word: Prosody and predicate initial sentences in Serbian

Second position clitics in Serbian are informally characterized in terms of their hosts which correspond to either the first word or the first phrase within some clitic positioning domain. Serbian is a free constituent order language, with a default SVO order, but with predicate initial orders in the presence of pro-drop or postposed subjects. Earlier proposals range from those in which first phrase positioning is taken to be syntactic and first word to be prosodic, with the initial prosodic word hosting the clitics (Zec and Inkelas 1990; Halpern 1995), to those which analyze both FirstPhrase and FirstWord as a unified syntactic phenomenon (Franks and Progovac 1994; Bošković 2001). While we argue for the relevance of prosody in first word placement, we shed new light on the scope of its role. This article is part of the Special Collection:Prosody and Constituent Structure</a

Nasal consonants, sonority, and syllable phonotactics: the dual nasal hypothesis

We investigate the phonotactic behaviour of nasal consonants in a database of over 200 languages. Our findings challenge the common classification of nasals as intermediate between obstruents and liquids on the sonority hierarchy. Instead, we propose that there are two types of nasal consonants, one group with lower sonority than liquids and one with higher sonority. We propose that these two types of nasals differ in the presence or absence of a value for the feature [±continuant]