Article published in:
Formal Studies in Slovenian Syntax: In honor of Janez Orešnik
Edited by Franc Lanko Marušič and Rok Žaucer
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 236] 2016
► pp. 55–68

Participles come back to Slovenian

| Cornell University
In Slavic noun phrases an adjective normally precedes a noun, as in English ‘new student’. If the adjective has a complement of its own, in half the languages, e.g. Russian, this complement follows it: ‘a new-to-me student’. Russian historically lost most of its participles, but later they were borrowed back in from Church Slavonic, and in keeping with their value of adjective derived from a verb, they fit into the adjective-complement-noun word order: ‘a reading-books student’. Slovenian, like e.g. Czech and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, instead has complement-adjective-noun word order in its noun phrase: ‘a to-me-new student’. Slovenian lost most participles, but active participles were later re-introduced, and these indeed joined the existing Slovenian complement-adjective-noun order: ‘a books-reading student’.
Published online: 08 December 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.236.03bro
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