Preliminary communication
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE POSITION OF AN ADJECTIVE ATTRIBUTE IN CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN VERSUS MODERN CROATIAN
Damir Mišetić
orcid.org/0000-0002-7330-4457
; University of Mostar
Abstract
Although typology linguistics categorizes clearly both Italian and Croatian into the same group of
languages that have SVO order of the basic syntactic units, and although both languages have a
relatively free word order, there are some significant differences that have to be pointed out. There
are clear rules for these word order differences or at least tendencies, so that Italian language be
easier for the Croatian speakers and Italian texts more comprehensive. The position of attributive
adjective in relation to the noun is different in the two languages so that we believe this topic should
be further discussed as it deserves a much larger attention than it was the case earlier. For the
speakers of Croatian language it is of high importance to point out the different meaning and the
stylistic value of the adjectives in Italian depending on the position of the adjective in front of the
noun or behind it, on the position of two or more adjectives and on the position of the words that
Italian grammarians traditionally call adjectives, which is not the case with Croatian grammarians.
This paper aims at contributing to the development of linguistic competence and to a better
and more complete comprehension of modern Italian texts as well as artistic and literature texts
and their composition. It discusses influences of the change of syntactic units order (ie order of the
attributive adjectives) onto their semantics.
Keywords
basic syntactic units order; position of an adjective in relation to the noun to which it belongs in Croatian; position of an adjective in relation to the noun to which it belongs in Italian; difference in meaning connected to the position of adjectives in Italian; stylistic differences connected to the position of an adjective.
Hrčak ID:
233743
URI
Publication date:
31.12.2018.
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