A Linguist's Linguist: Studies in South Slavic Linguistics in Honor of E. Wayles Brown

On Leo Tolstoy, Its Structure, Case, Left-Branch Extraction, and Prosodic Inversion

On Leo To/stoy, Its Structure, Case, Left-Branch Extraction, and Prosodic Inversion* Zeljko Boskovic The goal of this paper is to discuss the internal structure of complex names in Serbo-Croatian (SC) as well as its relevance for clitic placement . Four different patterns are posited based on the behavior of complex names with respect to case, left-branch extraction, focalization , modification by adjectives, and occurrence in inherent case contexts . However, the patterns are argued to have only two different structures, many of the differences between the different patterns receiving non-structural explanations. Regarding clitic placement, it is argued that SC complex names provide evidence against the Prosodic Inversion account of SC clitic placement. I also provide ways of teasing apart default case and caseless options for various nominal elements, an important distinction which is shown to have consequences for several phenomena. The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 discusses the relevance of SC complex names for clitic placement by examining the behavior of complex names with respect to left-branch extraction and focalization. Section 2 examines the behavior of complex names with respect to modification by adjectives and occurrence in inherent case contexts and makes a proposal regarding the internal structure of complex * I thank Sandra Stjepanovic, Steven Franks, an anonymous referee, and the audiences at Formal Approaches to South Slavic and Balkan Languages 6, held in Dubrovnik in 2008, and Sarajevo Linguistic Gathering 3, held in Sarajevo in 2008, for helpful discussion of the material discussed in this paper. It is a privilege to be able to dedicate this paper to Wayles Browne as a small token of appreciation for everything he has done for Slavic linguistics. One of those things was in fact first introducing the problem of splitting names such as Lav Tolstoj, in his 1975/2004 seminal study (d. pages 268-269 of the reprint). Indeed, this name has been used so often in the previous literature on splitting of SC names that the source of the original observation is sometimes forgotten. Steven Franks, Vrinda Chidambaram, and Brian Joseph, eds. A Linguist's Linguist: Studies in South Slavic Linguistics in Honor of E. Wa yles Browne. Bloomington, IN: Siavica, 99122 . 100 ZELJKO B OSKOVIC names. Section 3 examines the behavior of inverted names, where the surname precedes the forename. Section 4 provides ways of teasing apart the default case and caseless options for various nominal elements as well as the consequences of this distinction for several phenomena . Section 5 examines the behavior of female names, which differ in several respects from male names. Section 6 is the conclusion. 1. left-Branch Extraction and Prosodic Inversion It is well-known that SC is rather permissive in the possibilities for extraction of left branches of traditional noun phrases (see Boskovic 2005a and references therein). It even allows extraction of one name in complex names, as (1) and (2) showl (1) Lava Citam Tolstoja. LeoAcc read TolstoYAcc 'I read Leo Tolstoy.' (2) U Gornjem zivi Vakufu. in Upperwc lives Vakufwc 'He/She lives in Upper Vakuf.' Franks (1998) and Boskovic (2001) note a rather interesting paradigm concerning complex name extraction. In some cases it is possible to inflect for case only the first or the last name. In such cases, first name extraction is completely impossible. (For ease of exposition I refer to this pattern as the uninflected pattern, though the term is not really appropriate since Toistoj in (3a) and Lav (3b) bear default nominative case, as discussed in section 4.f 1 There might be some speaker variation regarding extraction of names in first +last name complexes. Some speakers actually strongly prefer the remnant to precede the verb. Such speakers find (1) but not (i) degraded. (i) Lava on Tolstoja (ita. Leo he Tolstoy reads 2 The pattern in question is possible with foreign male names, but generally not with native male names. Even with respect to the former, speakers differ regarding which names are allowed to participate in the pattern in question. A speaker's familiarity with who the name denotes seems to be one of the fac- ON LEO TOLSTOY (3) a. Lava Tolstoj citam. LeoAcc TolstoYNoM read b. Lav Tolstoja citam. LeoNoM TolstoYAcc read (4) a. *Lava Citam Tolstoj. b. *Lav citam Tolstoja. 101 Significantly, as discussed by Franks and Boskovic, a clitic (the auxiliary in (5)) is allowed to split a complex name just in case extraction can independently...