Filologija, No. 59, 2012.
Original scientific paper
Meaning and Usage of the Contrastive Conjunction da in the Old Croatian Language
Kristina Štrkalj Despot
orcid.org/0000-0001-9004-5103
; Institut za hrvatski jezik i jezikoslovlje
Abstract
Medieval polysyndethon — the exceptionally frequent usage and broad meaning of certain conjunctions (predominantly of the conjunction and) — is a dominant linguistic and stylistic characteristic of the oldest Croatian texts (and the oldest texts in other Indo-European languages as well). This characteristic has been slowly abandoned throughout the history of the Croatian language. The development from the exceptionally frequent usage and broad contrastive meaning of the Old Croatian conjunction da to its semantic specialization will be outlined in this paper. The conjunction da occurs quite frequently in the oldest Old Croatian records (e. g. in the Glagolitic Petris’ Codex from 1468.) due to its rather vague contrastive meaning; it had both a concessive meaning (synonymous with the specialized concessive contrastive conjunction ali) and a corrective meaning (synonymous with the specialized corrective contrastive conjunctions nere, ner and na) and was widely used instead of those conjunctions. However, codices from the beginning of the 17th century (e. g. Lulić’s Codex), show that the meaning of the conjunction da had already been significantly narrowed by that time and had become specialized for concessive meaning only, while the conjunction nego (and its synonyms) was being used exclusively to denote the corrective meaning.
Keywords
the contrastive conjunction da; the old Croatian language
Hrčak ID:
98092
URI
Publication date:
12.3.2013.
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