Subjekatska ekstrapozicija u bosanskom jeziku / Subject Extraposition in Bosnian

Abstract

Even though subject extraposition has not been mentioned as such in the grammars of South Slavic languages until the publication of Palić’s Grammar of the Bosnian Language: Syntax, Volume 1 (2024), that construction has been described in all these grammar books, whereby the most frequently used term for that construction was the subject sentence. In this paper, we hypothesize that the empty element to in extraposed sentences in Bosnian leads to their ungrammaticality (e.g. To je jasno da je školovanje skupo), in accordance with the insights from theoretical linguistics (e.g. PRO-DROP parameter in language and NON-OVERT PRONOUN pro), contrastive analysis of English and Bosnian and the author’s own linguistic intuition as a native speaker of Bosnian, but in contrast to Palić’s claim that such a construction represents a grammatical extraposed structure. In order to confirm this hypothesis, research has been conducted which used an acceptability judgment task as a method. The task involved 97 participants, native speakers of Bosnian. The results show a significant association between the condition and acceptability judgment, clearly indicating that the presence of the empty subject to has a strong negative effect on the grammaticality of extraposed sentences in Bosnian. Our hypothesis has thus been confirmed that subject extraposition in Bosnian does not require the presence of a dummy subject because Bosnian is a PRO-DROP language and as such allows empty subject positions in the surface structure. Furthermore, despite being a PRO-DROP language, Bosnian requires a subject pronoun pro in the deep structure of extraposed sentences, which is termed the NON-OVERT PRONOUN pro. It is this NON-OVERT PRONOUN pro that blocks the appearance of the dummy to in these constructions because the two are in complementary distribution. Although there is some variability among predicates that trigger subject extraposition in our research, the results indicate that the presence of a dummy subject to in Bosnian extraposed sentences dramatically reduces perceived grammaticality of these constructions.